What is the best money you spent on your blog? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 8:37 pm – August 25, 2011 by JT_McGee

Idk what you guys mean by social media, but the only SM platform I use is Twitter, and it has to be the best time-to-return investment in the world.

Here's my tweet gameplan, for what it's worth:

• I tweet maybe 10 things per day including news items I've read, cool things people send me, etc.

   

• I don't follow that many people, currently 194 people.  That's about 50 tweets per hour, based on a very quick scroll of the most recent content on twitter.  Do not follow everyone.  At a minimum, use lists.  I haven't segmented the people I follow because I haven't needed to. Following everyone/not sorting is a great way to feel overwhelmed. 

   

• Even though I don't follow everyone, I'm somehow up to 461 followers while following only 194. You don't have to follow everyone back to start getting bigger follower numbers. I'm sure people filter me as I have a high daily tweet count, but whatever.  Collateral damage.

   

• Every 2 hours or so I log into Twitter for maybe 2 minutes.  In that amount of time I can respond to people who have tweeted me, RT me, or to respond/RT stuff that catches my eye.  I do this during downtime that I have throughout the day on my phone, or via the computer.

Did a quick TVM calc deal to find the interest growth rate.  (Time value of Twitter? ) Basically, my twitter account followers grew at .28% per day in the last 90 days.  Super fast?  Nope, but if it sustains itself, I'll have 1200+ followers in a year, and roughly 3,550 in two years.  Are followers all that matter?  No, but use the power of compounding growth with SM, too.  This growth is without having any tweets go super viral, or going out of my way to promote my Twitter account.  Basically it's all organic growth through Twitter.

Idk if that's helpful, but there ya go. 

Sandy @ yesiamcheap said:

Best: $7.99 for the domain.

Worst: Not buying yesimcheap.com too…and finding a great ghostwriter that puts out 2 decent articles a month for about $6 each.  Can't beat that with a bat.

I wish I would have bought liverealnow.org, too.   Now it's a clueless, hippy, only-eat-food-grown-in-impossible-conditions-that-would-starve-the-world-if-turned-into-law "movement".  On the plus side, I've locked down the major social media vanity names, so they are stuck with the scraps.  :)

For anyone just starting out I would recommend buying a domain name and not relying on blogger. It is such a small initial outlay, but it is proabbly the most important. To build up ahve felxibility and complete ownership of all your work is priceless.

Mine was probably the money I spent on a 99designs contest to have a logo created for my site.

Great idea Melissa. We should start some kind of spreadsheet or something. I will start one in another thread. 

Melissa (Mom's Plans) said:

MoneyIsTheRoot said:

I would DEFINITELY hire a social media person! The amount of time that takes up on my part is just too much, not to mention there are people much better suited to handle it than myself.  I almost want to just bite the bullet and price some people out.  We have Yakezie that offer all sorts of services, but this is one I havent seen anyone dive into yet…

Money Is the Root–this is a good point.  I know there are many Yakezie members who offer different blogging services.  Is there somewhere we could find who is offering which services?  If not, we should have a place to list everyone who provides a service such as Crystal for advertising, Jesse for social media, etc.

Although I haven't yet spent much on my blog – the two things that have paid off so far are my heavy investment of time to get ranked and grow visitors (which still aren't where I want them to be) and hiring Crystal to do my ads!

When I start making more money from the blog I need to get a professional logo and site design, hire staff writers and someone who knows more about marketing (including social media)!

Great discussion item Suba.

Suba @ Wealth Informatics said:

Thanks a lot for the replies so far, guys! I did my own logo, but I am not against getting one professionally made in the future. 

 

I like my thesis theme too. And I moved 4 hosts before I settled on this one, my 5th lol. I lost some money in those, but I think this will be a good move (or I hope so).

 

I have been toying with the idea of having a mailing list, I just don't know what I will do with that :) 

 

For people who have not spent any money already, I think I should also add this 4th question

4) If you had a lot of money to invest in your business, what would you spend it on? Sort of like a wish list. 

 

Mine is a social media person and probably a VA.

 

 

Suba that's awesome you designed your own logo!  5 hosts, wow that's a lot.  But a good host is worth the extra money.  I had headaches at least 5 times a week on my old host.

If I had a ton of money, I think I'd invest indirectly by hiring a housekeeper and an awesome cook so that I could focus on my site more and get more interactive with commenting on other sites.  Right now I want to do as much blog work as I can on my own b/c it's fun and rewarding, it just gets tough juggling a day job, side jobs, blogging, eating healthy, keeping house, helping my parents, etc.

Everything Finance said:

@Charles, Thank God , I'm not the only one who tried Paid Traffic. 

 

@moneyinstheroot, I would hire a social media person TODAY! If anyone knows a person who can take care of social media and community building, please let me know.

 

 

I recommend Ashley @ Money Talks

For me it is outsourcing stuff I don't know/do

1)  Jesse from PF Firewall is a freaking animal freelancer – I am working with actually RIGHT this moment to fix my site that is broken lol (literally as I write this post).

2)  Using Melissa from MomsPlans – she does all my carnival work.  AMAZING money spent.

Hiring Crystal for my advertising was probably the best money spent. Although I don't know if that should count since she works on commission.  A few years ago I hired someone to optimize my Adsense on a commission basis and that worked out very well too.