Ever heard someone say ‘it takes money to make money’? Well, in the world of online marketing, that’s not entirely true — but it really, really helps. Let’s watch the development of two different websites, one of which starts with a thousand dollars and the other one of which is on a shoestring budget.
Without Money
Without money, the webmaster of www.sampleone.com can’t even engage in the most basic of affordable SEO unless he wants to do the work himself. He puts in several hours of work and builds himself some decent backlinks, because he’s no idiot and he’s done his research well in advance. As the days progress, sampleone.com manages to score first-page places on a few longtail keywords and gets up to a dozen visits per day.
A month later, scoring nearly 25 visits on average every day, and converting at an impressive 4%, sampleone.com is pulling in an average of one sale per day. The webmaster consumes that entire income keeping the basics of the business running, but as the actual business part of his business has grown a little bit, he has less time to concentrate on SEO.
With Money
The webmaster of sampletwo.com managed to sell a bunch of stuff he didn’t need on Ebay in order to fund his website, and he started with a bang. He paid an SEO company almost every red cent he had in order to purchase some high-quality keyword research and a long-term PPC management team.
The PPC managers used the keyword research to come up with a coherent plan for which keywords he should target and how much he should pay. While the webmaster went to work on every other aspect of his website — improving his product, detailing his website to increase conversions, and so forth — the PPC campaign pulled traffic. A month later, the PPC visits were approaching 100 per day. The extra time he spent on his conversions put him an entire percentage point above sampleone, and the time he spent on his product let him charge 10% more for it.
As such, where sampleone got 1 sale per day at $X, sampletwo got 5 sales per day at $X.X0, for a total of 550% more income than sampleone. That’s the power of spending a little money to make some money, and it happens every day.
When you are just starting to get a grip on the ins and outs of your 
If you aren’t selling something that people need — or at least believe they need — you won’t make it, period. Finding a niche that isn’t already overrun with fierce competition can be quite difficult, but even if you manage to come across a forum full of thousands of senior citizens with a strange interest in interracial dating and you have an amazing idea for helping them hook up, that’s no guarantee that RetiredSwirlCones.Com is going to do good business. You need to do whatever you’re doing well so that the people who do risk buying from you approve of what they buy.