Starting at the Edges

Average is boring, and most businesses don't capture the middle market until some edge finds them interesting and starts talking about them.

You can sorta think the same way about search engine rankings when you create content. If you are already in a hyper saturated market it is going to take a while to grow, but if you look for edges or ideas that are not well covered you can start building traffic streams, linkage data, and possibly consumer generated media.

The harder it is for people to currently solve their problem or find what they are looking for the less you have to do to be worthy of links or comments.

The fewer competing channels there are the less you have to do to be worthy of links or comments.

One of the biggest reasons I tried to make ThreadWatch more about search and SEM than just technology is because there are just too many competing channels covering "tech" for me to do it adequately unless I want to read RSS feeds 16 hours a day. Even then we would post so frequently that it would overwhelm those who primarily were there for the search stuff.

Example edges:

• MSN used to be powered by LookSmart. Back then you could write a page about a poorly covered topic, submit a site to Zeal, and instantly rank in MSN.

• Blog search has many holes like that right now. There is little barrier to entry to being seen on sites like Technorati. And most the people reading Technorati also probably write web pages.
• In any spreading story (there are more ways to track spreading spreading than you can count) you can play the devil's advocate. There are a near endless number of egos and angles around poorly reported biased quickly spreading stories.