5k to invest, what would you do?

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Lets say you had 5k to invest. What would you do with it and why?
 
The "I earn money by using other people's time"​

My current business needs "door-to-door" marketing, meaning I need to target businesses with outdated graphics, contact them displaying my services ( hassle free brand creation ) and hope some answer. If I would do this alone for 8 hours a day, I'd email at least 30 companies a day, with an actual non-generalized e-mail so that they feel I am doing this for them. However, I'd rather spend my time on something that not everyone can do.

Wages here in Romania are really low and people are looking for places to work, I could easily hire someone in the first day or two since I let them work from home, can work as many hours as they want as long as they send 30 e-mails from a mail I supply so I can check remotely, and minimum wage is $300 a month. I could easily get away with giving this job for $500, but for the sake of clean business I'd be able to invest $1000 into one quality worker that is less likely to try and get away with not doing his job. I would pay them this amount monthly for working 25 days out of 31.

Therefore, I'd e-mail 30*25=750 companies a month, and I'll lowball my conversion rate to 1%, since all these companies should be interested in it, the price I offer is really good for the quality I will display, and that means at least 7.5 companies will buy my product during a month. That would earn me $2250 at the cost of $1000.

Investing $5000 into this would mean I could either hire 5 workers at once ( less likely ) or hire 1 and have the money for his first 5 monthly wages. I would get at least double the money I invested into this, and would really do it if I had the capital since it would sky-rocket my business.
 
I'd find experts in my niche and pay them to write authoritative and carefully planned articles, freeing me from this task.

I'd also find someone who knows the niche in and out and loves social media and have them working it full-time. They'd promote these new articles and my past ones. They'd also do a lot of outreach through these channels while they are at it to earn more and more signals and links.

I'd take this newly found free time and get into the trenches hard, finding and earning link opportunities everywhere while leaking traffic. I'd cycle through all of the old and new articles and make sure they are all receiving solid links from quality sources. I'd also ensure they were interlinked well, along with proper on-page being done.

That'd be pure win. I'd hope to ramp up fast enough to continue paying this team, and then watch the whole thing snowball into complete domination.
 
$5,000 unfortunately just isn't a lot, even in the IM and SEO world. That makes me think that I'd go for a cheaper priced item that I can still make sure is high quality, over one very high priced item like a super backlink from some newspaper .

I'd either get a lot of content that I could schedule and then promote myself, like the guys above said, or I'd get a lot of content and build a ton of web 2.0's on one platform that I knew wasn't going to get deleted at some point, like wordpress.com. I'd then take those 100 web 2.0 accounts and interact with every single web 2.0 in the niche on that platform and get them weaved into the platform as a whole, and then i'd do some slight interaction with each other too, but nothing to set off red flags. Then I'd just let them sit for months, and slowly drop a new post on each one that linked back to my money site. I'd never blast them with spam either. Just let age and all of that interlinking do the job.

That was a fun thought experiment.
 
I would ask myself how I earned that 5k and how I can use it to keep doing what I did to earn it in the first place while having a safety net. Do you need to spend it, is it burning a hole in your pocket? If you earned that 5k on a shoestring budget in a relatively short period of time, how easily could you duplicate it if you had a few bucks to throw around this time? Not to mention this time around you'll know what you're doing from the very start and can avoid making the same mistakes.
 
For my specific situation I would start building TONS of leader generation websites in the real estate niche (I expect to get my license this month after I pass the school and state exam and the best opportunity I see both locally and nationally believe it or not is real estate).

With 5 grand I would build out 50 to 100 websites getting as exact match domains as I could and start getting articles on them. Write some email sequences and create relationships with the best buyer's agent in the areas I am getting leads.

The cool thing about having a real estate license is that you can make a living PURELY in lead generation BUT get the big payouts. I'm talking like 30% commission of what the agent makes.

Licence + Leads = Long-term passive income.
 
With the 5k , I would first plan carefully what I'm going to spend the money on (most important first). For me personally it would be to build my ideal system, choose my monetization method, then from there it's a matter of plug and play. I have found to always be the make or break for me, is to always be talking to and getting new leads, always! From there you can be much more picky on what you want to do.
 
I'd buy BuSo Pro.

Then I'd spend the other $4,985 exclusively on content, food, and shelter.
 
Hire 5 writers and have them apply to 5 contributor locations each. Package the resulting 25 editorial links to SEO managers. Then take the remaining $3,500 and use it to keep things running smoothly.
 
Second said:
Package the resulting 25 editorial links to SEO managers.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by this? Sell links to people? The phrasing is throwing me off. But yeah, even for just your own site, that'd be a good spend for sure.
 
Have you considered using content syndication networks (eg. Zemanta/Outbrain/Taboola) to raise brand awareness?

It's easy to setup and relatively cheap. As an example Zemanta does have a 20% service fee but you can get the CPC down to $0.05 which is awesome. Do note that not all are self-served however but you should be able to start out with a small budget to test the waters.

You could even give StumbleUpon a shot as its self-served and you can literally start with $10 or something like that. With saying that, the above content syndication networks did work out much better than StumbleUpon for my target audience.
 
I've seen really mixed results with paid stumble upon. My sites that did paid vs organic only submissions saw an even number of natural stumbles, while the paid stumbles bounced at the same rate and converted at the same below average rate.

I have funds still in paid and have been using them as YouTube views. They are the least engaged segment but it moves the counter in the right direction.
 
jakesnke said:
I've seen really mixed results with paid stumble upon. My sites that did paid vs organic only submissions saw an even number of natural stumbles, while the paid stumbles bounced at the same rate and converted at the same below average rate.

I have funds still in paid and have been using them as YouTube views. They are the least engaged segment but it moves the counter in the right direction.
Click to expand...

Exactly. For a current campaign we tried to targeting females aged 24 and over but the audience just isn't there as it's having trouble spending the budget.

2 years ago though I spend $10 on paid stumbles to an automotive infographic and that one ended up getting over 2,500 free stumbles which worked out nice. Perhaps the majority of their audience are males aged 16-30 or so?
 
I would use the first $100 to test an idea, another $100 on improving it and another $100-200 on creating the most basic service/product possible then market it either personally or with one traffic source that I think will give me the best results.

Whatever you do, forget that you have $5000 unless you've made atleast 20-25 sales. Then you'll have the data you need and you can put the $4000-4500 left with you to good use
 
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