I'm a bit surprised nobody has commented on this, yet. A few days ago the topic of "getting the word out" arose on searchguild (as in: you create that great unique quality content everybody is talking about, but how do you get the linkerati to know you have that linkworthy content...).
One of the moderators mentioned that he liked splitting his goals to rank for keywords into three categories: easy keywords to rank for, not easy but not too competitive ones, competitive ones...in order to "get the word out".
That made me think of what you wrote in seobook about your rule of thumb for page titles and using at least one competitive and one easy-to-rank-for keyword in the page title, etc..
After this advice on ranking new sites it seems as if you used the same strategy to get the word out for a new site: ranking it for long-tail phrases first (when it has basically no visibility, yet) and trying to go for the more competitive ones later?
I assume how well this works (to get the word out) depends a lot on the industry you're in. In industries where there are lots of forums and thus lots of conversation ranking for long-tail queries will help you get people to talk about your site on forums, etc. (if the content is "remarkable")? - sort of what you said about the gaming industry and people talking a lot there.
But in niches that don't really have particular forums that relate to it (certain products for example), this will not work as well, I assume? (though of course you should still try to target long-tail phrases first)
