I've recently been asked by a client (in the real estate industry) to put together a small online marketing campaign with only about $300-$500 to spend. My initial thought is to submit the site to paid directories since they act as both a source of potential traffic and backlinks to the client's site (which should improve their SE rank), but I've never tried PPC ads, so I'm not sure what the best solution is.

How would you spend $300-$500 in this situation?

Is that per year or per month?

oh yeah, per year (maybe 6 months if things go well)

Okay! No problem.

Do an awesome PPC campaign with the keywords that you know will convert and prove your client ROI - no testing here - experts only stuff. Spend all $500 in one month. Make it worth every penny of your time and his. Put in place all tracking measurements (including unique toll free number) to make sure the sale came from these SEM efforts. Wait for the best time of the year in his real estate cycle/season and launch it. With good keywords, you're probably looking at around 2,000 to 5,000 clickthroughs. Get at least a good 2% conversion to a lead form and your looking at 40 to 100 targeted leads.

With any luck, he might help buy or sell a house or two (maybe more, who knows) and with real estate commissions the ROI will be fabulous. Enough to convince him for an ongoing $500 p/month AT LEAST.

If it doesn't work, then at least you know that you gave it your best shot.

Honestly, I wouldn't see how it wouldn't work. Unless the website was one of those you can make out of those CD-ROMs that come in a cereal box, where the interested customer that was attracted by the PPC ad would be shocked at the landing page for a quick hit of the back button.

Mis 2 centavitos ;)

You really need to get an idea of the clients aims and try and match them with practical realities. If the aims are too high, then the client needs to increase their budget accordingly.

In this instance, it might be worth finding a specific niche that you can really exploit - there are still commercially lucrative niches you can practically wlk into with SEO, but the Real Estate business is extremely competitive, so it will be extremely difficult to hope to attack any particular SERPs for so little money.

It might be worth focussing on just one niche speciality service your client would most like to promote, and look at the possibility of setting up some keyword anchor text in directory submissions.

However, ultimately, you need to point out the marketing realities to your client, and that reaching millions of potential clients via competitive internet markets, takes a realistic force of money.

The client might even be better off throwing so small a budget at leaflet printing and distribution in the local area, and leave the internet to those who want to promote themselves seriously on it.

Don't waste anyone's time with $300-$500 budget for a year (even six months for real estate). I and many others in here know that even with tight reigns, PPC wouldn't last long in that industry, even localized. Also, forget getting any good SEO for that (unless you do it yourself on weekends).

The only answer is a local PPC test campaign with highly-targeted keywords and a couple landing pages with different calls to action. If you can get even three sales/buys from that, you will have more than satisfied the RE agent that the money is worth it.