Best use of money when blogging

1. If your budget is tight look to free traffic sources.

2. Then save your money to make you blog easier to use, better converting, and cleaner looking. Everything you can do to get more sales / conversions / income from it.

3. Then look to paid advertising. If paid advertising is too costly then go back to step 2 and make things generate money income or master the paid advertising source better.

I wouldn't worry about traffic. I would invest in some images and design stuff. You'll make money over time. Paying for SEO and traffic is tough road that many never exit. Focus on the content.

Are we making the Build It And They Will Come mistake though?

It depends on where your site is at & where you'd like to take it.

Are you already ranking for keywords & getting great search engine traffic? If you aren't & you'd like to, set aside some budget for SEO monthly.

If you're already ranking & just looking for extra traffic generation techniques like solo ads & guest blogging... then jump in and give it a try.

I would invest the money in high quality content. Then I would focus on building a list to build a long term sustainable business.

I'll invest on PPC. Pay Per Click is an advertising program in which ads are placed on your blog and you are paid whenever your visitors click on the ads. It is the most common method bloggers use to make money online. It involves almost no effort and is so incredibly easy that many blogs have too much advertising on them. Money is maximized as traffic levels increase.

Try CPM. advertisers place ads on your blog and you are paid based on how many times the ad shows up. This is good for blogs having huge traffic.

Invest money in traffic if you have offer(s) that convert or you can tweak to convert that will be profitable.

Whether you invest really depends on your model.

I focus on content. I invest $1 to $3 a day at DepositPhotos.com for images.

I've paid for tons of traffic, but I never made it pay except for one offer I have that makes spending on PPC (Adwords) worth it.

If your model is affiliate marketing/Adsense, unless you have excellent conversion with your list building followed by decent conversion for product promotion, spending on traffic may not pan out well. You can always work on it, but I've found, after spending thousands on paid traffic to squeeze pages that people who read my blog and then sign up to my list are much more responsive. Therefore, I focus on content and attracting non-paid traffic to my articles/posts.

One investment I think may be good, but requires planning is paying for an awesome infographic and then getting other blogs to publish it with a link to your site. It's a good traffic strategy if the infographic is in demand. Expect to pay $500 plus for a great infographic. I've created my own that aren't the best, but other blogs do publish them nevertheless.

If you have time to spare, better save the money and work on coming up with valuable and well written content for your site visitors and readers. This will get you more followers and subscribers in return, plus more traffic at no cost to you.

Focus on filling your blog with high quality content first.

After that I would try free methods such as Facebook, Youtube, Article marketing, and forums. This alone can generate you 100/1000s of viewers a month to your site.

Once you start earning some money test paid methods to see how it goes.

The main thing you need to do is always test which methods are working and which arent- then focus all your energy into the ones that are giving you great results.

How much would a high quality content / article cost?

I'm focusing on content for my blog. Id I have plenty of good content the people will come.

If you would like to spend money use pay per click to buy traffic for your landing pages where you promote offers. This way you can get quick returns fast and keep using the money that you earn. But make yourself familiar with PPC first.

There's no reason to spend money on advertising, (especially if it's not in the budget) when so many free sources for backlinking are available. Though you will have to invest your own time if you don't want to pay someone else to backlink (content creation/article distribution/bookmarking).

I'll throw my two cents in and add to those who say to focus on content. Do whatever you can to make your blog "sticky" and build a regular base of readers. In the long run, these are the folks who will buy your products, that is, once they see you as an expert in your niche, and that isn't going to happen if you don't have above-average content.

The fact that you chose blogging as your marketing strategy is free from the off anyway. I would spend money on a good auto-responder, some good graphics for all your social profiles if you aren't good at design yourself. Maybe a good course that covers everything. I recommend Tribe Traffic Mastery, send me a message if you are interested in finding out more about that.

A good theme, maybe optimise press if you are planning to do lots of capture pages, membership sites etc.

Commentluv premium and pretty link pro, i couldnt live without.

I wouldn't spend much on paid ads until you need to, spend time building your relationships, networks, figuring out your niche and working your craft, being social.

You might want to consider mentoring.

I would focus on properly identifying my target audience. This, truly, is the secret.

Spend money on making your blogs perform as well as they can do.

Get someone to do some snazzy graphics, but make sure you test to see which one best achieves your goals.

Look to traffic generation once you have your blogs all looking pretty and converting well...

Then you will hopefully be making enough money form them not to worry about the question of where the money will come from to invest...