What to put money in first - SEO or advertising?

Are you being serious? (I'm asking this honestly)

Do you really believe that I'm being so generalised as to mean that sleeping and eating are things you should be paid for?

You're going way overboard trying to make your point.

The only thing YOU have to offer that can't be got from someone else is YOUR time.

Only you know how valuable your life is and how valuable your time is.

However - we're talking about work and making money here.

The OP has a business and is looking for the best way to spend his time and money on that his business.

The reason people say Time is Money is because to them it's the only thing they can't get back after it's spent. You can't replace it. Whatever you do with your time when you're focused on your business is time you can choose what to do with - if you waste your time then it's gone. If you use it productively on your business then it's still gone but it created some other value for your business.

By your logic your time is worthless and I can sit around all day eating burgers because that doesn't 'cost anything'.

However if I did that - I would have lost the opportunity to charge a client $3000 for some work.

Maybe you don't see that lost $3k as a cost but if that's how I pay my bills then not using my time to earn money will end up with me living on the street.

Because I work from home for myself - the biggest decision I ever have to make is - how to spend my time today.

Why? Because whether I make money or not depends on the answer.

The reason I don't come here and run WSOs every day offering article writing services for $1 an article is because - it would take too much of my time for the return it would get. It would be a 'waste of time'.

Today is a classic example.

I have 4 clients that all have work they want me to do - It's the weekend but I could sit at home and do some of that work and on Monday put some invoices in for about $1500. Am I going to? No. Why - because I have other things I want to do with my time.

Since most people work during the week, a lot of my friends and family are more available at the weekend - so I'll spend my time with them.

Perhaps I'll get bored at some point over the weekend and just do some work because I like it and want to help my clients, but maybe not.

The point is - the difference between whether I make a few grand this weekend or not is how much I value my time.

If I wasn't sure whether I could pay my bills next month then I'd probably choose to work all weekend because that time would make me money.

Obviously - I'm not intending to charge my clients for the time I spend eating or sleeping and I don't consider that lost earnings time - that would be STUPID.

If you really don't see why people value their time and consider time spent doing something that could easily be outsourced as affecting their revenue in some way - I don't think we'll find a middle ground on this.

Anyway- this wasn't even my point.

My point was if you are going to invest your 'valuable' time into an activity at least make sure you know the value of that activity.

I've seen a LOT of IMers treating their time as worthless and spending a lot of it doing things that never create any value or any income for them - and THAT is why I say get to know your business and which traffic converts before spending too much time finding out you spent a lot of time getting the wrong traffic.

I don't imagine that's a difficult concept to deal with but some people will still just think of seo as 'free' because there's no financial cost and then wonder later why their traffic doesn't convert - some people just need to learn these lessons for themselves and people like me trying to save them to pain we've had learning it for ourselves are wasting our time.

The end.... I'm not going to try to rationalise this anymore - I thought that the concept of your limited time being valuable was something most people understood and if you're not one of them then I really have no interest in trying to convert you.