If you had $100 to invest in SEO - How would you use it?

$100 can produce plenty of parasites.

Honestly, I don't know what you can achieve with $100 in white-hat SEO. You could consider black-hat SEO, but that's even harder and riskier—Google is constantly tightening its rules, so investing $100 into black-hat methods will most likely just be wasted.

From my own experience, a minimum monthly budget of $1000 is necessary, and that's assuming you clearly know what you're doing, starting completely from scratch. Otherwise, even that $1000 will go down the drain. And this applies to non-English markets—in English markets, you'll need even more funding for content creation and backlinks.

White-hat SEO is an expensive marketing strategy. The benefit is the long-tail effect, but the downsides are high costs and slow results. Nowadays, this field isn't a game where someone inexperienced with little to no funds can easily jump in. The old days—when you could simply set up a WordPress site, post a few articles daily, and make money—are long gone.

My advice? Just save your $100 or spend it on something enjoyable—at least then you'll get some happiness out of it.

If I had $100, I’d be honest — it’s not much to work with in SEO. I wouldn’t waste it on cheap guest posts or PBNs, because most of them are either low quality or end up being nofollow.
Instead, I’d buy a decent domain and hosting, then build a small site with 2 or 3 useful tools. You can use GPL scripts or free APIs to make it fast.

After that, I’d use parasite SEO — post on Reddit, Medium, or Quora with backlinks to your tool pages.
Then I’d spend around $20 on buying some aged social media accounts with existing trust, like expired Twitter or Pinterest profiles.
If your content solves a real problem, it can get shared naturally and start pulling traffic without needing many backlinks.

The key is focusing on value, not vanity metrics. Build something useful first, and the rankings will follow later.
Just my 2 cents.

Festinger Vault said:

If I had $100, I’d be honest — it’s not much to work with in SEO. I wouldn’t waste it on cheap guest posts or PBNs, because most of them are either low quality or end up being nofollow.
Instead, I’d buy a decent domain and hosting, then build a small site with 2 or 3 useful tools. You can use GPL scripts or free APIs to make it fast.

After that, I’d use parasite SEO — post on Reddit, Medium, or Quora with backlinks to your tool pages.
Then I’d spend around $20 on buying some aged social media accounts with existing trust, like expired Twitter or Pinterest profiles.
If your content solves a real problem, it can get shared naturally and start pulling traffic without needing many backlinks.

The key is focusing on value, not vanity metrics. Build something useful first, and the rankings will follow later.
Just my 2 cents.

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This is indeed an amazing advice
I'm doing something similar and it's already giving me returns, traffic from Reddit, Quora, etc can be a goldmine

I would buy a few high quality backlinks

powlow29 said:

$10 for domain name
$5 for hosting
$85 for 3 good wine bottles
I'm french sorry

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yes the above, then get working and start creating your own backlinks and content

It really depends on your goals, but if it’s short-term gains, a solid PBN network can work. For long-term value, I’d go with one high-authority guest post. Are you aiming for quick traffic or building domain trust?

Investing money in just one decent guest post can be good idea. It can help to build quality backlinks and improve website ranking. PBNs can be risky as search engines like Google may penalize for using them. Quality guest posts can be safer option for long term success. So, my suggestion is to go for guest posts rather than PBNs.

Expired Domain. (it must be already having backlinks, try to utilize it for your keywords). Then try to use chatgpt, Claude for content and edit it as per your needs.

In 100 dollars you will not get a very good expired domain but you will learn a lot in experimenting. And you are going to need a lot more money in SEO industry for hosting, tools, links, content etc.

$100 is not a lot - I guess I would spend it in foundational links, tier 1 or 2.

If you are too worried about spending money on SEO, it might not be the right time to focus on ranking your site or growing traffic.

With a $100 budget, I would invest in a good SEO tool than spend it on guest posts, niche edits, or PBNs.

1 or 2 HQ niche relevant guest post sites with strong metrics and real traffic.
(Handwritten content)