How much of your monthyl income do you put aside for marketing and seo work?

I usually invest something above 30%, that is in my online store and some few other websites.

I would dedicate 100% of my income if I knew it would give me a positive ROI. You can't set aside a percentage. You're limiting yourself on what you can make.

Here's why I DON'T invest money into SEO... there's no way to track the ROI. If I invest money into my business I want to be able track results. Optins, sales, conversion rates, upsell conversions, etc.

That being said, I invest any amount of money I can in which will return a positive ROI. These can be PPC, solo ads, media buys, WSO's, etc.

Very good question and I thank you for the answers given. I am interested in investing on seo services to because for the moment I do everything by my own. On the other hand I want to invest on good quality services....and as DustonMcGroarty mentions be sure to have a ROI.

It really depends on where you are with your business. If your just starting, 100%. Once you start seeing success you can start drawing an income. This business is like any other business, if you don't feed it, it won't grow.

"if you don't feed it, it won't grow" this comment says it all - I have been guilty of not feeding my sites and they have been hit.

The reason I suggested a percentage of net income is because in good months you invest more while it bad months you invest less. I think i will put aside 20% of my net income in the future - not sure what I will spend it on yet, any ideas?

No, the exact opposite, here.

When I first started, I used to put aside about 10% of what I earned each month toward expenses (mostly to spend on outsourced SEO) and it took me a long time to learn to appreciate that it was a complete waste of time and money. I stopped doing that a long time ago. I look back now and wish I'd never done it at all.

I think the answer to this is necessarily going to vary hugely, according to people's business models?

For example, there are AdWords experts spending $2,000 per day on ad campaigns that bring them in $2,500 per day (over $15,000 per month profit on a turnover of $60,000, which is hugely successful, of course). And there are people like me (and many more of us!), whose only real expenses are hosting, domain names and an autoresponder, which add up to almost nothing.

What kind of figure (even what kind of proportion of profits, which is perhaps a more helpful parameter?) clearly depends what kind of business it is, no?

I certainly won't be spending any more money on off-page SEO, anyway.

Not only is search engine traffic the poorest quality and the hardest to convert, in every single niche of my business, but a business that depends on Google for its traffic (as so many Warriors have found out over the last year or so, some of them to their very great cost) is only ever going to be one algorithm-change away from a potential accident or even a potential disaster. This is decidedly not "the way forward".

Alexa

What would you recommend to grow an affiliate site?

I put around 25-35% per month on SEO. It varies per month because my strategy for ranking is different. This does include a few hosting and a few other stuffs too.

Putting aside 20% of your income is definitely the way to go. When I first started, I kept putting my profit back into my business. At first, this left me with little money, but then my profits started to grow exponentially and very quickly.

It was well worth it, especially because I made back my investment plus profit.

None .. I build platforms that automate SEO and Marketing

I think this pretty much depends on which stage of the business you are. I am SEO and I do about 80% of online marketing by myself, so the budget is not too high.