Best Traffic Source: Outsource?

You can blow through 2k on seo pretty quickly and if you buy the wrong kind, zap.. there goes all your rankings. I would only recommend hiring a white hat seo provider who focuses more on promoting your site instead of just getting spammy backlinks.

In fact, you're better off managing it yourself and getting the content created for specific reasons and using the content to the promote your site, and do some of the more questionable techniques to those promotion pieces.

If that wasn't clear... look at it like this. You get an article written and put on your blog. Then you get a Press Release written, have a VA transfer your original article into various other forms of content(video, audio)..... then you have your VA do all the hard work.

You get get a VA for less than $400 per month and be more effective and safe than hiring an SEO who may do some untrustworthy stuff just to get fast results.

With a VA you can use different traffic techniques and still outsource some SEO work at the same time. Look at it more as a business and a way to step back and manage your business from a distance and less as a way to trick google.. that's gotten quite a few sites de-indexed over the years.

If you are looking to hire a freelancer or company for SEO be very careful. A past client of ours got hit hard by Penguin because he outsourced his SEO to a company that held little regard for SEO best practices. I would echo what Victor said and try to control it as much as possible.

Outsource to someone who knows how to build the right links and knows the best sources. Full compliance with Google's quality standards and best practices is non-negotiable.

$2000 will not satisfy you if you use that money to buy traffic directlty. Hire someone and pay $250 to $300 a month to for solid linkbuilding, SEO, and content. There is no "long term traffic" if you buy it directly.

You dont have to outsource. Do some simple PPC, solo ads, and blog advertising. You can advertising on the content/display network and simulate the idea of advertising on high traffic websites - without going contacting the site owner. This is possible with Adwords and Bing Ads.

Just buy advertising spaces from very high traffic blogs and site for like $400 a month and watch the subs list grow...