How to Spend $500 to $1,000/Month?

To Increase Rankings

[ember]

I have spent the last 5 years building an email list to generate traffic with little thought about SEO. I think I've gone as far as I can with opt in subscribers and am now looking toward SEO. I have a budget of $500 to $1,000 a month to spend on marketing. What should I be concentrating on? Link building? Hiring writers to generate more content? Will an SEO firm look at me with this small a budget?

[aristotle]

Before you spend any money, I suggest that you work out your basic strategy. Are you going to target specifivc search terms? If so, you need to identify them so that you can start optimizing your site for them. Are you going to take the "shot-gun" approach and try to get most of your traffic from long-tail searches? If so, you need to develop your site in that direction. Or is it feasible for you to use both appraoches simultaneously. I think you need to make some basic decisions before spending any money on SEO..