So you’ve got $100 to spend and you want to use it wisely. What do you do? Well, first thing to do is to read part one of this article about how to use money to promote your blog. Next, let’s get back down to business.

Buy a page on a paid wiki

For $100, you could buy a page on the Million Dollar Wiki or the Million Euro Wiki. The current buzz is surrounding the Million Euro Wiki, which launched just recently. There are less pages on the MEW and therefore there is less competition for page views. If you are going to get in with either of the paid wikis, the time to do it is right now. You need to ask yourself if you can make that $100 work for you. Not everyone will be able to.

Start a new blog

Although not directly beneficial to your existing blog network initially, there is always the option of spending some of your $100 on a new domain and starting a brand new blog. Having a network of blogs makes it easier for you to make money blogging. Pick your topic and get writing – it’s that simple.

Invest in a killer logo

There are heaps of freelance designers out there who could add a touch of pizzazz to your blog. If you need something done, just make a post on Digital Point and within minutes you’ll have five people all wanting to help you out. Beware! Some of them suck. This guy, however, is brilliant. He made my logo for $10 and I love it. He’s actually made three logos for me so far. If you want to brand your blog, you need a logo.

Outsource writing work

In the past, I’ve outsourced article writing for just $4 an article. It sounds silly because my full-time job is writing, but I don’t always have time for completing laborious tasks. At $4 an article, you can’t complain, and you can get some decent content up on your blogs while your time can be spent on other things. If you want the contact for a guy I use, email me and I’ll send you his address.

Start an ad campaign

Yahoo Search Marketing, Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter – whoever you chose for your ad campaign, you will be able to target readers to come to your blog for a small fee (from $0.01 per click, depending on whether you Yahoo, Google or Microsoft your ads). Learning about ad campaigns is a useful skill and something I trying my hand at recently through Yahoo Search Marketing. You will get traffic to your blog, but you have to look at what sort of traffic you are getting and whether your blog can benefit from it.

Obviously you can’t do all of these things with $100, but you’ve got options. What would you do? What have I missed? Maybe you missed part one of this article. Go and check it out and share your thoughts here.

Tags: Blog promotion by Angel
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Let’s say you just won $100, like Becky did in my last blog contest. What are you going to do with that money? You have a number of options, but what you really need to decide is if you are going to keep that money or invest it back into your blog. There are a lot of people after that $100 and what you do with it could drastically improve your blog and your chances of making money online.

What are your options?

Buy blog reviews

You don’t have to spend $400 for a review on John Chow’s blog. There are plenty of blogs where you can get your site reviewed for $100 or less. Cash Quests is the obvious example, where you can get reviewed for $80. At the moment, you can get reviewed by Michael Kwan, who writes John Chow’s Review Me reviews, for just $40. Another to consider is Ben Cook, who has built up a solid readership in less than three months. He currently charges $100 a review.

The benefits of buying a review are traffic, links and advice. If you pick the write review, you can make the most out of all three of these.

Invest in domains

Remember when I wrote about how to buy dropped domains? If you have $100, you have the opportunity to buy dropped domains with Page Rank and links, and extend your existing network. Better yet, you could buy domains that have no been dropped, and create your network that way. You can use these acquired domains to generate additional sources of income and to link to your own blogs, thus boosting Page Rank and SERPs.

Buy text links

With $100, you can buy a whole bunch of text links. What you want to look for are two things: blogs with Page Rank/linkbacks and blogs with traffic. If you purchase a text link that has prime placement on a blog and the creative you use is catchy enough, you will get traffic. If you purchase on a blog with Page Rank/links and your creative is based around the keywords you target (”make money”, for example) you can receive a boost in SERPs for that keyword, and if your link is up when Google takes its snapshot of Page Rank, you might see some changes in that respect too. Text Link Ads is the obvious place to look like links, but don’t rule out Linkworth as well. At other times, you can approach bloggers directly to inquire about buying links.

Buy advertising space

Those 125×125 ad blocks are all the rage. Carl Ocab is selling ad blocks for just $40 at the moment while Courtney Tuttle’s blogs are going for just $50! Ad spots like these can generate traffic if you can catch a reader’s eye. It’s not rocket science, so pick a high-traffic blog and get your ad up.

Buy other blogs

It seems ridiculous, but for $100 you can buy other people’s blogs. Sometimes bloggers give up on their quests, while sometimes they just don’t have time to maintain everything. You can buy blogs for content, the domain, Page Rank, linkbacks, and a number of other aspects. You could buy a blog with a posting history and start writing paid reviews on it straight away, or you could use the foundations of a blog to build it into something new. As you trundle around the blogosphere, make a note of blogs that have apparently died. If one catches your interest, make an offer. Blogs for sale crop up on webmaster forums a lot too.

Would any of these options meet your needs? What would you say is a wise investment?

Part two of what to do with your $100 is here.

Tags: Blog promotion by Angel
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So who’s still talking about Blog Rush? I’m shocked that so many bloggers are yet to remove that monstrosity of a widget that does nothing but drive traffic out of their blogs. For a start, the hype surrounding Blog Rush was enough to put me off right from the start. People were working very hard to convince their readerships that this was the next big thing.

I chose to stay off the Blog Rush bandwagon because I didn’t want to clutter my sidebar up with something so large and intrusive. It’s not as if you can blend it in with your color scheme. The fact that it sticks out so much draws attention to it and the links it displays. Do you really want people clicking those links and reading someone else’s blog? May as well shoot yourself in the foot.

As 5xMom rightly points out, you not only randomly link out to the rest of the blogosphere, but you link out to people who you would otherwise avoid. Where’s the sense in that? Then there’s the fact that I’ve seen the same thing as Blog Rush before, albeit using HTML links.

Ben Cook benefited from a staggering one click through to his blog with Blog Rush from just under 600 impressions. Pro Blogger got less than 50 clicks from 70,000 impressions. John Cow managed to generate 172 clicks from almost 30,000 impressions, which was great for him, but as Ben proved, for smaller bloggers with less potential to generate massive amounts of referrals (John Cow has 460 already), the widget is redundant. Even John Chow only got 91 hits from 27,000 impressions.

I also keep arriving at blogs and seeing an error message in the place where the Blog Rush widgets should be.

Ditch Blog Rush! It’s clogging up your blog and making it look hideous.

Tags: Blog promotion by Angel
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