The clever guy down at SEOish set 7 of the industry’s top experts the challenge of recommending a website marketing strategy for people with a tight budget. As many of you will appreciate, it can be difficult to decide where you’ll get the best “bang for your buck” in website marketing when you have limited finances.

The challenge set by Patrick at SEOish was:

“If you had to make a website soar but had only small chunks of money to spend on it what would you do? - (The “chunks” are 100 dollars, 250 dollars and 500 dollars.)

The experts who answered the challenge were:

• Neil Patel - social media and optimization specialist.
• Lee Odden - founder of TopSEO and regular search marketing speaker
• Andy Beal - Blogging and SEM consultant - author of Marketing Pilgrim
• Aaron Wall - The author of the infamous SEOBook.
• Andy Hagans - Link baiting extraordinaire.
• Kid Disco (CK Chung) - up and coming search engine marketer.
• Todd Malicoat (Stuntdbl) - well known SEM and social media expert and blogger.
• Patrick Sexton (feedthebot) - the author of the article.

Some of their ideas were great, some just common sense, and some tinged with a bit of good old fashioned internet marketer humor.

Rather than duplicating all their recommendations, I’ve made a summary of the best ideas below. If you want to read their recommendations in detail, pop over to SEOish.

The top recommendations across all experts were:

• Proper web hosting is critical
• Quality content is essential
• Link building is the foundation of success
• Never stop the learning process…

So here are some of the highlight recommendations:

“With $100… I think I would buy some cheap hosting, put up a WordPress CMS, find some good affiliate programs, and start writing and optimizing.” Kid Disco

“I would make sure the standard site promotion tactics are in place: Optimized content creation, link building and especially online and offline networking. Do a great job of telling the story the site has to tell and get the attention of journalists writing about that industry. Become a trusted resource without demands for reciprocation from the media and they will reward you with generous coverage, as will the search engines.”
Lee Odden

“If I only had a small amount of money and wanted to make a website soar I would leverage social media. You could potentially do it for free, but if I had $100 I would try and create 1 great piece of content and push it out on all of the social sites…. The overall goal would be to get these articles thousands of unique visitors and thousands of links so that the site could get some search love.” Neil Patel

“If you do not have a website yet, use this money to acquire a real web host. Use caution when you choose a webhost, there are many possible pitfalls…. A good webhost will provide stats, easy access, and other goodies that make it worthwhile.” Patrick Sexton

Top Humorous Recommendations:

“find an income source that can help me pay my living costs while I furiously learned” Aaron Wall

“$500 = I’d get a $250 roundtrip ticket to my nearest SES, SMX or PubCon conference. Spend $100 for a hotel for one night. Then blow the remaining $150 buying drinks at the bar for all the SEO’s that hang out. It will be the best $500 you’ve ever spent!” Andy Beal - probably a serious recommendation - but could be pitching for a free drink

I think that Stuntdbl summed up the bootstrap website marketing strategy best:

“I don’t think there is one sure fire plan based on the amount of money you have, but the point is, that it shouldn’t take MUCH money to make more if you do so strategically using the tools that are available to you. The power of e-mail alone is amazing. The power of a great article and web publishing is astounding. The power of good links and great rankings is mind boggling. The power of your voice and your mind can help you to up those chunks until you’re playing with much bigger pieces. It takes some cajones, lots of dedication, and a workaholic mentality, but a lot can certainly be done with a little.”

I hope you’re inspired by some of their ideas and reaffirmed by others. More than anything, website marketing takes time and perserverence, and you need to remember to budget that in also.