Where best to invest to grow your website?

I have a budget, but how should I spend it?

[arthur22]

I've realized that one area that I've been slack in is investing my earnings back into my most successful site. I was wondering what the most sensible strategy is for reinvesting profits.

I'm sure this will vary from site to site, but let's say you had an informational red widget website, not ecommerce, just adsense and banners etc, and you wanted to pour some money into it.

Do you buy a faster server? Some text links? Some adverts? Do you pay people to post on your new forum? Pay an SEO company (a proper one) to advise you?

Does anyone have experiences to share about how you invested in your site for the better?

[martinibuster]

If you are considering paying for forum posts then growing your forum is perhaps a direction to move in. I have never paid for posts and wouldn't ever consider it. I just grow the content side then place links from there to the forum, pay daily attention to the forum, cultivate repeat visitors, treat the forum like a community, encourage questions from the contact and about us page to be placed in the forum. Above all, research your competition, make their weaknesses your strengths. You don't need to go head to head against their strengths at this point. The goal is to cultivate community growth by offering something unavailable elsewhere by creating a valid proposition for why someone would want to switch from brand A to B. Which is where researching weaknesses, the things that cause dissatisfaction comes in. Those dissatisfactions and weaknesses can form the backbone for growing your community.

Advertising on AdWords is an option, as is advertising on other non-forum sites. Once the community has reached a decent momentum then you can start the link building. The link building for forum begins with the link beg campaign, the old research the competition approach. That's the starting point, but after the community has momentum.