Five Ways to Spend $1000 on your Blog
June 5, 2007 by John Hewitt
The beauty of blogging as a business is that the overhead is so low. Even a robust blogging operation generally costs only a few thousand dollars a year to maintain and for those who are very strapped for cash, blogging can be done for almost nothing. All you need is access to a computer and space on a free public blogging service such as blogger. Just because blogging can be done cheaply, doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from investing some money into your blog. Let’s say that you’ve already secured a web provider, Internet connection a decent computer. You’ve also been blogging for at least long enough to build up a backlog of articles for people to read once they arrive at your site. Now that you have the basics taken care of, you’ve come up with another thousand dollars to invest in the site. The question is, where can you spend it in order to do the most good? Here are five ways to spend $1000 on your blog:
Advertise
Advertising is an obvious and easy choice when you want to drive traffic to your blog. There are hundreds of ways to advertise. Both Google and Yahoo offer context-sensitive advertising services that allow you to spread the word about your site. There are plenty of other online advertising services as well. A more time consuming, but possibly more rewarding system is to look for web sites (blogs and otherwise) that appeal to similar users and contact them directly with an offer to pay for advertising space on their site. Don’t limit your thinking to the web though. You may find you get more mileage out of a well-designed newspaper or magazine ad. If your blog is more about a locality, you may even consider radio advertising (television is probably out of your range).
Have your site redesigned by a professional
An attractive and professional looking web site lends authority to a blog. A quick check of a site such as elance.com reveals that there are many web designers willing to create attractive web sites and logos for under $1000. Just be sure to find a designer who has created sites that you consider to be attractive.
Give the money away
One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to hold a contest. Problogger.net has gotten a lot of mileage (and links) out of its Group Writing Projects. The latest project offered a prize of $1000 cash and resulted in 893 other bloggers writing for the project (and linking to problogger). Not only does a contest like that attract new visitors who want to join the contest, but the links generated by the contest will pay dividends for years to come.
Hire an assistant
For $1000 you can hire a virtual assistant to spend 20 hours a month for 5 months helping you with various blog related tasks such as research, basic web design, web marketing, webpage maintenance, optimizing web pages for search engines, accounting and taxes.
Release a book
Finally, for $1000 you can use a service such as Lulu to print and distribute a book. If you have been blogging steadily, you may find that you have enough material for a book already on hand. There are several advantages to publishing a book. It gives you something that you can sell through your blog, having a published book adds to your stature as a blogger, a book gives you an additional marketing and public relations tool, and a book gives you something you can show to your parents and friends to prove that you actually have been doing something worthwhile with your time.
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5 Responses to “Five Ways to Spend $1000 on your Blog”
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I am pleased to see you mention the value of working with a Virtual Assistant.
However, i am shocked (as others are) that there are VAs who charge $10.00/hour. As a business owner and independent contractor, we must provide our own benefits – insurance, vacation, equipment, and more. A rate of $10.00/hour minus the overhead/benefit upcharge that a ‘normal’ business would have – brings the hourly earnings to less than $4.00/hour, as it is common to estimate a business’ benefit/tax costs as 1.5 times the hourly salary.
By devaluing themselves to this extent, they do themselves and the industry and disservice. I am sure they provide excellent service to their clients, but $10.00/hour does not make a living wage.
Many of us have business degrees, years of experience. belong to professional organizations, and a huge commitment to our business and clients.
Here’s hoping that clients and ‘VA services’ realize the true value of a Virtual Assistant.
[...] up on the posts from the VACOC, Lorri posted about the following blog by John Hewitt and how to spend $1,000 on a variety of services. One of them was to use a VA [...]
Hi Kyle,
Thank you for the comment.
The company that I link to is a well-known firm out of India. I agree that $10.00 is a fairly low wage in America, but due to exchange rates and economic conditions in India it is an average rate there. I sympathize with your predicament. It can be hard to compete with outsourcing. My post, however, was about getting value out of your $1000.
Your challenge is to present enough value as an American virtual assistant to make your services worth more than those offered abroad, because international competition is going to be a fact of life in your industry. As you say on your web site, “The only thing I can’t handle, given the distance is getting your coffee.” I’m afraid that is true for them as well.
The writing industry is also facing the challenges of outsourcing and globalization. I have worked for Intel, Motorola and IBM, all of whom have outsourced at least part of their technical writing operations. Some of those outsourcing efforts have been successful and others have sent them racing back to native workers. I am sure it will be the same with virtual assistants.
I can understand the whole Virtual assistant thing, but the prices seem way too expensive.
I currently pay an American in the Philippines who just had a baby, $5 USD a day to help me with content.
$10 an hour is way too funny. The guy I got, I had come across a post on his blog:
http://blogger-a-blogging.blogspot.com/2007/06/blog-writer-for-5-day.html
Now I have 7 different Martial Arts blogs to help with content to get more traffic to my product sales page.
I personally do not have the time to maintain that much content, but this guy is good and honest. First off he told me that he had no experience in any martial arts, but I thought I would give him a go anyway. His first couple of posts…not so good…but as he research more and more his posts got longer and more indepth. I get about 1 post for every hour that I am sleeping cause it is day there when it is night here State side.
I highly recommend this guy I am sure he does not spend 40 hours a week on my blogs but then again I cannot complain seeing as he gets the work done and it only costs me $35 for a 7 day week.
So what can you get for $1000? I say 8 blogs a day, 7 days a week for 6 months or 1500 blog posts. $0.66 for each post.
Good price to pay for the traffic the content creates.
I think it would be worth it for a trial. He too can do basic html work and modify graphics and create navigation menus. I t is my understanding that he has Macromedia Studio on his puter since every thing I send him to do he says he’ll do it with “fireworks”.
The only down fall is the payments, I pay weekly via Western Union. He will accept monthly but not right off the back.
Hi Nick,
It certainly looks like you found a bargain. I’m not sure of any exchange rate that makes $5 a day worthwhile, but as long as it works for the two of you, good luck with it!