The most obvious places to look for outsourcing work are the Digital Point and Sitepoint forums. There are hundreds of guys and gals offering all different kinds of services that you can capitalize on.

So, what services might you want to outsource?

First up is directory submissions. It is tedious even to do semi-automated submissions yourself. It takes a long time. There are people on Digital Point who will submit your URL to 1,000 directories for about $10. Directory submission isn’t something you need to be doing all the time, so go for a bulk order for each of your domains early on and get it over with.

Social bookmarking can also be outsourced. You can get one of your deeplinks submitted to 100 social bookmarking sites for about $10-15. This is worth doing as it gives your blog some added exposure. Some of the links will also be dofollow so that’s an added bonus. Be sure to submit only your best content here.

Article submission is available in various guises on the forums. You can get one article submitted to hundreds of directories, or have one item rewrote and submitted, or have one article “spun”. There are a variety of options. You’ll probably not benefit from submitting identical articles to hundreds of directories because of the duplicate content issue.

On that note, some people offer services of writing and submitting articles. This can get expensive, but article marketing should be one aspect of your linkbuilding.

If you need content and don’t have time to write it, you can find writers on Digital Point. Most of them suck, however, and are only good for low-quality, bulk-writing deals. You might pay $2.50 per 400-word article, but the articles will be difficult to read. Use wisely. Quality writers are better sought elsewhere.

Blog commenting on dofollow blogs is also offered by a few people. The price you pay versus the benefit you receive doesn’t make these services that appealing in my eyes. You also run the risk of your comments being marked as spam so that when you go to leave a legit comment on a blog, your comment will automatically be filtered.

When you hire someone from the Internet, check out samples of their work, look at their reputation and iTrader levels, and read other people’s comment on the service. Set deadlines and don’t pay a whole bunch of money upfront if you aren’t 100% confident of the work being delivered on time.

It makes sense to upload as many photos as you can to increase you presence in the search engines. The photos don’t have to be high-res, but they should be big enough for people to be able to see what is going on.

I take all of my photographs with a Canon EOS 450. I had forgotten about more than a hundred photos of Phuket on my hard drive, so when I came across them, I resized them and uploaded them straight to my blog.

If you don’t have any photographs, all you need to do is spend some time going out and snapping anything relevant to your blog. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good photographer or not, but having photographs will help with your rankings.

What I was looking for with my press release about Phuket hotels was to get the release ranking well for that term and thus generating traffic and some decent link juice. I used PRWeb for this particular release. The SEO options that allows you to include links and anchor texts cost $200.

The press release I wrote focused on my partnership with a hotel booking website to offer discount rates on Phuket hotels. the results were positive, with traffic coming from the day the release was published. If you have a little money to spend, I recommend coming up with something newsworthy for your website or blog and then writing a press release about it.

These lenses usually hold some authority in search engines because Squidoo is a trusted website. What’s more, you’re not creating a junk page. If you put a bit of time and effort into your lens, it has value and will be treated as such.

A Squidoo lens can be beneficial to your blog or website in several ways. Firstly, you can link out as you please. If you have a blog about cars then you can write a lens about cars, link out to pages on your blog and reap the benefits. This is a good way of building links, if nothing else, because the links are all dofollow.

Furthermore, if a lens you make becomes popular, you can drive traffic to your sites. Lenses become popular in the same was as any page of content on the Internet. You build links, use social bookmarking sites and promote your lens to get it noticed.

Lenses are categorized and ranked by Squidoo, so if you have the top travel lens, you can expect to gain a lot of traffic from it.

I’ve created a few lenses. You can see them here:

• Phuket hotels
• Phuket nightlife
• Patong Beach
• Phuket beaches
• Phuket girls
• Phuket restaurants
• Patong girls
• Acai “free trial offer” scams

I say all of this theoretically because my lenses have yet to become popular and really benefit me in any way. However, I’m still new to the whole Squidoo thing so I will keep experimenting and see just what these lenses are capable of.

If you’ve had any positive results from Squidoos, please share you experiences here.

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.

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.

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.

The reason for my banning is down to taking part in Digg exchanges. It’s kind of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” set up. There are forums where you can go and get people to Digg your urls in exchange for Digging theirs. If you do enough, you can potentially generate some serious traffic, and possibly make money.

The irony is that the exchanges I’ve been doing this week are actually weighted to my Stumbleupon account, because what I’ve been doing is offering Diggs or Stumbles in return for people adding me a friend on Stumbleupon.

The theory behind this as I’ve read on several blogs and forums is that the more friends you have (up to a maximum of 200), the more weight your stumbles hold, and the more powerful your account becomes. Then, when you choose to Stumble your own urls in the future, more people will see this and start Stumbling your articles, creating a snowball effect.

I’ve always had more success bending the rules with Stumbleupon than I have with Digg. In the past, participating in Stumble exchanges has generated up to about 400 unique hits in a day. It’s not a great deal, and it’s not the best sort of traffic, but it proves that Stumbleupon is easy to manipulate. Try stumbling a landing page and you might make some referrals and some extra money; drive people to an article laden with PPC ads and you could get some click-throughs and even more money.

It’s not guaranteed, but Stumbleupon are far more lenient with people abusing their system than Digg are. I opened a new Digg account, but haven’t bothered to start using it again.

Speaking of stumbleupon, go ahead and add me as a friend. My url is vanalli.stumbleupon.com

When coming up with ways to link bait, you should bear in mind that most link-bait posts are quite boring. The two-way exchange between bloggers is healthy, but should not be overused. For the past couple of weeks, Blog Curry has had very little content except reviews that the author has offered to do for sites that review his blog.

His blog is a PR4 blog and so it’s not a bad thing to get a review up there, but with the sheer number of reviews being posted day after day, I doubt that many people are actually paying attention to them any more. I’d rather see multiple reviews bulked into one post and more of the content that the blogger is capable of writing.

This goes for all bloggers who choose to link out to others: if you are going to link out often, you don’t always have to be nice. Most bloggers are actually quite receptive to constructive criticism; and if they’re not, they should be.

Perhaps I’m setting myself up for a fall here, but not every blog is perfect. I find myself ignoring most short, link-baiting blog reviews because they don’t have anything worthwhile to say. That’s all well and good as the links are useful, but if you’re link baiting too much it can make your blog look a little too rosy.

The way it works is simple: you enter the core details of your blog that most website directories use, and then navigate through the software’s list of 350 blog directories, sorted by Page Rank. The Page Ranks range from 0 to 6, with a good number having the higher ranks.

You have to go through each directory manually with the software, but having all the directories accessible from a list and using the software to auto-fill the majority (not all) of the forms makes the whole process a lot quicker than it otherwise would be.

The software is free and I have been using it for the past couple of days with complete success. You can sue the software to add a number of websites. The software is inventively named Directory Submitter. They have an affiliate program, but to benefit from it you need to get people to purchase the upgrade, which offers 1,000 directories instead of the usual 350.

Follow this link to Directory Submitter and try it out for yourself. Let me know what you think. Maybe it’s just a waste of time, but I’m convinced it’s a useful tool.