Since blogging has become popular there are far more people writing than their are good ideas to spread. This means that if you can create a good idea marketed at publishers looking for a scoop, and format the idea to spread you can probably get enough link authority to get a natural PageRank 6 in just about any market.

Obvious Story Seed Locations:

Each day the Digg homepage and Del.icio.us popular lists have new content posted. There are also a couple major channels in just about every field that people pay attention to. If you can get featured on any one of these you can capture the attention of a targeted market.

If you read and learn these channels, and then create, format, and target your content with the intent of capturing one of these markets or publishers it should be easy to get featured.

Following Up With Email:

Don't rely on any one channel to spread your story. If it gets blocked for any reason you want other back ups that will help spread your story.

While you have mind-share follow up with personalized emails. In some cases it might make sense to remind people that you were as seen on and in other cases (such as rivals like Gizmodo vs Engadget) that might offend them. Sometimes putting an as featured in link in your email signature is a more confident, more tactful, and less overt way of showing that credibility.

Is Sending an Email Spamming?

If you are carpet bombing cheesy off target link exchange requests for my-viagra-texas-holdem-mortgage--9.biz then that is spamming.

Many sites have a tips@blah.com email address. They are not being spammed when you solicit coverage of quality content...it is something they are asking for, and something they need to keep publishing cutting edge stories first.

Sure email is push, but the large gain from it is the pull of that channel. If it is targeted and personalized and they ask for it I don't see how they could consider it spam.

Realistic Expectations:

Email allows you to personally target your message to a targeted group of influential people. As long as it is well targeted and personalized it rarely backfires. You can't expect them all to work, but if you get exposure on a few channels that is all you need to seed the story.

People do not see or know of your emails that had little or no effect, they only see people talking about your site on the active channels.

News Half Life: Why Email is Crucial:

Once news is a week old it no longer is news. It is stale. Being featured on few premium channels all at once will cause a story to spread much further than if you try contacting them slowly over time.

Once something is years old it might be worth reformatting and turning it into news again, but if it is just a few weeks old it is much harder to get people to care than it is fresh off the presses.

Cascading Effects:

Being seen on a number of authoritative sites leads to more coverage. Recently I got a story featured on the Digg.com home page and sent out 2 emails to authoritative blogs. Both blogs covered the story, it made the Del.icio.us popular list, got linked to from Wired Magazine, and a couple hundred unique sites linked at it.

My only regret is that I didn't take the time to send out a dozen more emails. But if I didn't get covered in all 3 of those authoritative channels right away I might have only got a few links out of it. Each trusted independant citation makes it easier for people to trust the story as being valuable and important, and leads to a cascading set of inbound links.

Since their is so much attention concentrated on the top few channels and there are many more people writing than there are original thinkers or good ideas to spread these authoritative co-citations lead to many second tier site owners feeling that they need to publish the news too.

New Channel Discovery:

After spreading a few ideas you will find many other channels to target that you may not have thought of. Did you know that Recruiting.com was a Digg clone? Or that HGTV is adding a community feature? Or that MSN is using a Digg-like feature for news in some of their smaller markets?

Drifting on Someone Else's Story:

Some might consider it unethical to snag someone else's story, but many stories spread because they are formatted to be spin and lies. If you see spin spreading debunk it on your own site or directly on the site producing the spin.

Yesterday an analytics company posted a blog entry about what Google properties are growing and dying. I commented that I thought it was spin (clearly stating why). I knew lots of people would read that story and that some would read the comments on the page and link at me. At least one person did.

The earlier you debunk a story the more links you get as their story spreads.

The Golden Age of Pull Marketing:

Any indication of demand, any channel spreading stories, any story that is spreading...all of these are fair game to track and leverage for easy exposure. It is easy to see what ideas are spreading, who is spreading them, and what formats work. It is the golden age of pull marketing.

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The Golden Age of Pull Marketing was a phrase Andy Hagans used in a phone conversation I had with him. I asked him if it was ok to make a post titled that. He said it was as long as I begged you to subscribe to the Tropical SEO feed. He also said he would love me long times if I asked for you to unsubscribe from Scoreboard Media while you were playing with your feed reader.

As more and more content is created there are more publishers than there are good ideas, which means publishers are hungry to spread the few good ideas that exist. What separates a profitable channel from a money loser is typically two things: ideas and execution. Because I have been posting about a more diverse set of topics sometimes outside of SEO I get asked lots of business strategy questions. Many of them revolve around "and then I will pay someone $10-20 an hour to help with the strategy", but the problem is that if your strategy comes from someone else you are going to need to pay a lot more than that for GOOD strategy, and if they are willing to work for meager rates for a while and notice that all your value is built off their ideas it won't take long for there to be an ego conflict that causes them to quit working for you and start working for themselves.

Site design can be outsourced. So can programming, writing, and project management, but if you are not giving up an equity stake, and expect your workers to be the ideas guy eventually they are going to quit...at least if they have ideas worth sharing.

The reason consultants can charge $500 to $1,000 an hour is because they can create and spread good ideas that create significant market leverage and value quickly.

As an entrepreneur you either need to have a lot of capital to invest and/or be the ideas guy. And you need to excute.

When submitting to directories, buying paid search ads, buying display ads, or ranking in organic search a small company with a smart marketer can seem like it is much more powerful and much more authoritative than it is. But some webmasters undermine their authority by not considering how displaying ads on their own site could affect the perception of quality.

Which Directory is the Best?

Many directories sell sitewide banner ads to other directories, which directly states the other directory is of higher quality and more worthy of submitting to, not only for how the ads flow link equity, but also for the general brand perception.

Sell Yourself First:

Some sites make the same error of undermining their perceived site quality by placing external ads above their house ads or internal products. An earlier version of my site design placed other ads in-line with the content and the ad for my book on the sidebar. The day I put my ebook ad inline with the site content my sales tripled. If you have an editorial site that people subscribe to the easiest thing to sell should be your own stuff since people reading your site already trust you. Now my site has less ads, a better brand perception, and more profit.

Promote Your Content to Sell the Ads:

Without distribution it is hard to make money from advertising. Without heavily promoting the value of your content it is hard to get much distribution, especially with the self reinforcing nature of networks and the web.

Some sites are so optimized for short term profits that they undermine their own authority by placing a large ad block above the content. There are many creative ways to slightly reduce ad CTR while still leaving the general perception of quality to most site visitors. Just about every link you get will be from someone who visits your site. If your site leaves a good perception of quality and trustworthiness it is much easier to be deemed as linkworthy than if your site looks like an ad farm. AdSense aligned top and to the left is the equivalent of a noisy FFA page.

The order you place things in tells readers of your site what you think is most important. If you are in a competitive marketplace it is hard to compete if you place other brands or ads above your content.

Without marketing great ideas go nowhere. Google's Larry Page recently stated:

"Virtually all economic growth (in the world) was due to technological progress. I think as a society we're not really paying attention to that," Page said. "Science has a real marketing problem. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem."

Tim Berners-Lee, who created the WWW, wrote this in Weaving the Web:

People have sometimes asked me whether I am upset that I have not made a lot of money from the Web. In fact, I made some quite conscious decisions about which way to take my life. These I would not change - though I am making no comment on what I might do in the future. What does distress me, though, is how important a question it seems to be to some. This happens mostly in America, not Europe. What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person’s value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money. That suggests disrespect for the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and technology. Core in my upbringing was a value system that put monetary gain well in its place, behind things like doing what I really want to do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children’s’ sights on cash rather than on things that will actually make them happy.

I have always been fascinated at the idea of bridging science with marketing because (from limited conversations I have had with various scientists) it seems that most scientists are nearly purely academic, or are populists who know little about their topic. It seems like there is not enough time for someone to do marketing and cutting edge research, or is there? And if/when you start marketing aggressively does it undermine the credibility of the scientific research?

Alexa updated and now shows link data, top websites by language or geographic market, as well as your top geographic markets. They also provide a site report service where they crawl your site for broken links.