you decide to name your company (or a pseudonym) with a 4 or a 9 because those are the numbers with the fewest outbound links on the Better Business Bureau Online site.

Focus on a niche and focus on getting the right core users.

I have been getting lots of questions about marketing a site on no budget. The words that are used are not the following, but the question invariable is How do I market my bland useless me too site? The answer invariably is don't make your site bland and useless and expect to market it on $0.

There is a balance on time and money. If you can't afford much money to market your site it likely means you do not place exceptional value on your time. Thus they surely can afford to learn about something they are interested in and then share what they learned.

Most information is in one form or another repackaged. As the amount of information continues to grow logarithmically there is going to be an increasing amount of value in being able to create vertical editorial websites that point out the best news and information.

If you have no money to invest in marketing does it make sense to try to learn how to market something useless? Why start your brand with a meeee ttooooo empty product database?

Or does it make more sense to learn your market first, create content about things that interest you, and then later use that channel to help push your other ideas?

A site does not need to be big to make lots of money, but original content that grows over time draws passive traffic streams that continue to grow. It also helps you get quick feedback and allows you to launch new ideas and have them spread quickly.

The guys at Google are geniuses who are amazing marketers and had great market timing. Most people will fail if they try to go that broadly though. Think of how many search engines you can think of. There have been thousands of attempts and almost all have fail.

You can own large verticals with algorithms too though. The guys at Topix, a leading news site, are no doubt geniuses and were able to smartly create amazing algorithms and then use that to leverage great partnerships.

Most websites and webmasters are not going to do fundamentally innovative things that allow them to work on large data sets the way some of the large resource rich companies do.

But you do not have to be a programming whiz or have infinite resources to do well so long as you are:

• interested in a topic

• willing to work hard at tracking and learning it
• focused on a niche
• opinionated

If you are all of those 4 you should be able to beat out an algorithmic driven process every time. If you can't then it just means you need to focus more on a niche, become more opinionated, or pick a topic you are more interested in.

The feedback cycles take time and unless you are absolutely great at writing the first 6 months to a year can start to look a bit bleak, but after that you should be able to grow quicker than the market does, so long as you did not start off in a niche that was already hyper saturated.

More and more companies are fighting to create ad networks that help automate the monetization of content. If you don't have any money to push an ecommerce site then you might do well to push content creation and leverage that original content, mind share, and traffic flow for profit.

Negative publicity or affiliates may end up eating a large amount of the search results for your brand name.

If it is negative publicity of course you should take the message on board, but what do you do if you solved the problem and the bad search results will not go away? Directly contacting them and showing the problem has been fixed might help. Maybe even offering to donate to a charity may help, but if the person will not work with you it is going to be up to you to create other content that can be deemed more authoritative than theirs.

If the affiliates add a lot of value of course them listing below you for your brand name is no big deal, but what happens if they are thin affiliate pages that add no value, or worse yet try to use your brand to push people to a competing product with a higher payout? Is there another way to add search results to the index that will not cost you a percent of your sales?

Press Coverage:
The first thing you want to do is ensure you are leveraging your authority and brand correctly. Are you well known? Has your company been covered in the press? If so do not be afraid to point a few links at the good press pages.

Extend Press Coverage:
Look for press coverage in search results for your brand name. Also look through your backlink data. You may be able to talk to people who were mildly interested and get them to do more in depth coverage of your goods and services.

Wikipedia:
If you have a strong enough brand you may be able to list your company in the Wikipedia. If your stuff is legitimate I typically recommend creating a whole page instead of just adding a link because I believe most pages have to go through a deletion cycle vote before they are deleted. Make sure to reference media coverage in your Wikipedia article.

Creating your own topic page in Wikipedia also makes it easier for it to rank for your brand since the whole page is focused on your brand, instead of your site just being mentioned in a link.

Keep in mind that if you are trying to block out negative comments and have not changed the business model or issues that caused them you may be giving people another avenue to criticize your business in the Wikipedia page about your company.

The earlier you get into Wikipedia the lower the bar will be. As they create more content, get more citations, and have logarithmically growing costs it will be harder to get into the Wikipedia.

Social Networks:
Set up pages on sites like MySpace.com, Facebook, and Twitter. Sites like Knowem make it easy to register your brand on many sites.

Press Releases:
Press releases typically do not pack a huge punch in the search results, but they do well in news search, and if you point a few links at them it could also help them outrank other pages that are not on high trust websites.

PRleap and PRWeb are a few free resources on that front.

Good press releases can also lead to other media coverage.

Interviews and Writing Articles:
Just like press releases it is another easy way to create content that is highly relevant to your brand or name. Make sure you link at it to help build it up. If you write for a somewhat well known site, and especially if you can make something a bit controversial or appealing to a link authority rich group that page should pack a punch in the SERPs.

If you interview someone else that is popular then others may heavily link at it. Add a few more links and it may be able to rank.

Blog for Others:
You have to build up some amount of trust before you can do self promotional stuff on other sites, but if you are creative with how you write you can keep a page from sounding too self promo while virtually guaranteeing it will rank by including the right words in it and placing it on an authority site.

Sites like Lockergnome have guest authors write some of their channels.

Vertical Databases:
Sell software? Do you have a profile page on Download.com, HotScripts, or sites like ZDnet.com? If not why not?

Give away software? Are you listed on all the software AND freeware directories?

Highly Relevant Second Page on Your Site:
Create an about page that you link to sitewide. When you write content and submit it to other sites point some of the signature links and whatnot back at your about page instead of at the home page. Do this to try to get a double listing.

Subdomains:
You probably do not need to create many of them for this purpose, but maybe you can create a subdomain for part of your business and then link it up.

Local Sites:
Create sites for different regions. Maybe create sites for different user groups. One domain for consumers, one for distributors, etc.

Profile Pages:
MSN's Small Business Directory allows you to create a company profile page. Make sure you point a few links at it and it should rank for semi competitive phrases.

There are also other types of profile pages that may require deeper thinking to find and then deep thinking to debate the consequences of. Creative Commons has a directory with profile pages.

Rent a Pre sell Page:
Rent a whole page advertisement on someone else's site.

Blogging, Forums, and Social Sites:
Create a blog on Blogspot or one on Wordpress.com. Or maybe one on each.

Create forum user names and make a few posts. Link back to that profile to build up its authority.

Many sites such as Newsvine, Squidoo, or some free host sites also allow you to create pages on their sites which may help you leverage the authority of their domains.

Creativity:
There are many ways to leverage big ideas that are not your own. For example, what is to stop you from creating a Wordpress theme that is named after your company.

I am not certain why, but I have been getting lots of requests from claimed SEO companies that want to outsource 100% of the link building associated with SEO.

My typical response is:

If you don't do link building you are not a real SEO.

That may sound brutal, but it is true. Here is why:

There are the rare sites that have already spent millions of dollars building their brands to where all they need done is descriptive unique page title and making sure their content management system works. Then there are sites like SearchEngineWatch that are just the authority sites in their field, self reinforcing market positions and a decade of writing quality content about a topic the author loves. But most sites do not fall into those categories. If you feel a site needs more links to compete, why - other than laziness - would you want to outsource 100% of the link building project?

If a site is in non competitive fields sure a few directory listings and the like may be all that is needed. But if that is all that is needed I don't think it is hard to develop processes to do that sort of stuff.

If your an individual person who runs one website I guess it may make sense to outsource that to a person who provides affordable services, but if you are an SEO company with recurring work and new clients coming through all the time it doesn't make sense to outsource it.

Sure some people make certain services cheap and are really good at what they do, but if the price gets too cheap and the process is fairly automated the link quality is going to be low.

As far as link builders I would recommend, I would have no problem paying Eric Ward for the connections he has and his solid site announcement history. I also know and trust Debra Mataler well enough to know she would do a good job building links.

As Stuntdubl said, you want to balance the link equation. Get a variety of link types. A good link builder will do that for you. But it is hard to build an SEO business model that

• is profitable

• gives clients individualized attention
• provides end to end solutions

If you guarantee success with your service you are better off doing affiliate marketing than selling SEO services. You get a larger percent of the action that way and have no clients!

Demand for SEO lags what is most effective and many people think they just need more PageRank. And many of the most profitable business models are going to revolve around selling pieces of the pie instead of selling the whole process. Many of the SEO firms that have been contacting me wanted to outsource 100% of their link building to link brokers.

Some links are about social relationships. Those are key in hyper competitive fields. How can you compete in hyper competitive fields if you are not learning the market or pushing social relationships? How can you even know what budget to allocate for link building if you don't do it? If people should buy link services off a link builder then what value does a clueless SEO firm add by taking a cut charging a premium for their own ignorance?

I am friends with a few link brokers, and know pieces of their partner networks, business models, and link types. Some of the content sites in the networks are so good that they provide enough direct value to pay for themselves even if they had no effect on SEO. Of course it would be hard to say that about all link buys. Sure some of the links probably do count well and others probably don't count at all.

Assuming all the links from link brokers counted in all search algorithms (that would be being hyper optimistic) there would still be a few fundamental flaws with only building links from brokers:

• A link profile consisting of only one link type is not a real natural profile.

• If nearly all your links come from a few networks or are brokered through a few people then the odds are pretty good that a competitor is going to come in contact with the person who is selling you links.
• Most people selling links will also sell links to competing sites.
• If you get to the top of the search results there is little effort needed to duplicate your actions if all your links are rented.

I am not trying to hate on any individual type of link. I just think that you should mix what you use. If possible do all of the following

• articles (these make great direct sales)

• press releases (when I was a total no name a well known Yahoo! search engineer saw one of my press releases and reviewed my ebook for me based on a press release)
• directories (most are one time fee)
• viral marketing opportunities, free tools, & ideas (these are hard to do but also hard to replicate, and are the cheapest link opportunities if you land a good one)
• affiliate marketing (you set your payout percent, affiliates only get paid if they convert, and it still builds your brand even if the links do not count for SEO)
• buy links where others are not looking (use Yahoo!'s advanced search page or the concept in this tool. Instead of only entering add URL search for ezine ad, associations, history, and other ideas which may provide greater value than the typical add URL search)
• if you can afford it do off the web marketing that drives online activity
• if you can afford it maybe it makes sense to buy an old site or the rights to publish content on old sites

A couple years ago effective SEO was using the same anchor text everywhere and just getting thousands of low quality links to point at you. That is not the case anymore. A strong link building program

• Should be able to help guarantee usage data and targeted traffic that converts (since people tend to click on legitimate links and trust what is perceived as an unpaid recommendation).

• Should provide secondary links that were not requested. If a site like SearchEngineWatch writes an article about your site you can guarantee that others will syndicate how interesting your site is.
• Is hard to replicate.
• Mixes your link profile.

Your link profile is about who knows you and who trusts you. If you outsource that outside of your client and outside of your business I think you owe it to your clients to at least know enough about the following:

• how to evaluate how competitive a market is

• the value add of different linking strategies
• the risk vs reward profiles of different linking strategies
• why it is important to mix link types

With certain sites in certain industries it can cut into your credibility to have lots of misspellings.

Although I hate to admit it, one of the biggest things holding back my credibility is spelling errors. Some people just can't take a misspelling fool seriously. Others empathise with my skills and type misspelled queries into their engine of choice.

Matt Cutts recently said that using correct spelling is good for SEO. This couldn't be any further from the truth for most boring hollow shallow lead generation / affiliate marketing / contextual ad websites (aka: 99% of the web).

Misspellings probably occur in somewhere around 10% of search queries. Across the board misspelled terms are probably less than 10% as competitive as the correct spelled counterparts. Sure some people will opt to use the search engine spell correction tools, but many do not.

While some misspellings cost me links and credibility, others earned me thousands of dollars.

Truth be told, I was financially screwed when I made those thousands of dollars off of one particular spelling error that comes to mind. Had I not been a bad speller I may have been bankrupt (and I would have neve typed this post).

Not all your sites have to be associated with your name, and I am not ashamed to profit from being a naturally craptastic speller. Is your good spelling holding back your earning potential?