I'd probably pick up another domain and put Whoisgauard on it. (Or if I had a domain already then I might extend it and it's whoisguard.)
I mean you can get a free theme that'll work decently enough at first. (Or if you're good at skin design for blogs then you could possibly make your own skin for your blog.)
And 20$ for advertising is nothing. Even 100$ barely does anything. (Though this may depend on who you buy advertising from and what terms/conditions are in place. Like if you buy an ad slot on a private site for a month for 5$ that might benefit you more than 100$ in adwords.)
Another one to rule out is comments... (paying people to comment on your blog.) You can often get people to comment for free by doing exchanges or getting post/comment packs on FP.
But perhaps you could use 20$ to get a few higher quality guest articles done?
I don't know what the going rate for higher quality articles are... but I could see getting up to 4 articles out of 20$. (Granted I am not a fan of paying for articles or posts. But if you needed a break for a few days I suppose this could help supplement your blog in the meantime.)
I would probably use the $20 to advertise and get the word about my blog out to sources with a lot of traffic exposure. I may also use a service like SEO Clerk to find some cheap services to help build my site's traffic.
Well, I have a wordpress blog, if you would double the amount I would buy opensky plugin for Email opt-in, but if only 20$ is allowed I would buy a banner ad on another blog to promote my blog or maybe give it away for my blog readers.
I don't own a blog, but if I did, I'd probably use the $20 for a domain, and perhaps a theme. Unfortunately, while there are many people willing to make themes for both blogs and forums (I almost said "frogs"...been a tough week again!) sometimes these same people offer a lot of money just to have one done, so sometimes, unless you find someone willing to do it cheap and who can still make it look good, a lot of these people, while willing to help, they can be ridicoulously expensive.
I think I would make some sort of comment or blog contest and pay the winner $20 for the prize. 🙂 One could also have two winners and pay them $10 each for winning the contest. Doing things like that will probably keep your readers around your blog. And what is $20 anyways? Most of us pay more than that for hosting, you won't get much advertising with $20 and really its the perfect amount to give away to the readers.
I haven't ever really seen a theme going for $20. Most theme clubs charge way more than that and single themes are usually something like $45 and up. You might be able to get a better basic logo for $20.