The emphasis on openness helped make DMOZ a success, and if past performance is any indication of future performance, Blekko will be a success as well. They are currently in beta, so you might need to follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook to get an invite, but here is a review of their menu of great SEO research features.

Ranking Data

Want to know why particular sites rank?

Blekko offers background ranking data.

You can then drill down for more background ranking data. (Sorry for the small view, click here for a larger image).

And you can drill down further for even more background ranking data. (click here for a larger image).

Duplicate Content

Page by page and sitewide duplicate content analysis is offered. You can look for answers to key questions such as: Who is copying my content? Can I try to build links from some of these sources?

Who is duplicating my content wholesale? Are these sites linking to my site?

Competitive Research

What are the most popular pages on their site? How quickly does the authority fall off?

What sites are associated with a particular AdSense id?

Content generation

What are some of the newest pages created on a site? You could use this to track savvy publishers & sites like content mills to see what topics they are creating new content targeting.

How do different sites compare against each other in ranking profiles? Where is my site strong & where is it weak? What should I do to help round out my profile? If you are consistently stronger than competitors across the board & they are still outranking you then it might mean that you need to be more aggressive with link anchor text.

When you create a slashtag, you can sort the listed sites by domain authority. This can be helpful in finding some of the most popular sites within a category.

Detailed Link Analysis

What does their link anchor text breakdown look like? How aggressive are they with anchor text? How aggressive can I be before I potentially trip a filter? This line of thinking is also good to use when analyzing pages that have tripped a filter so you can sorta see where that line in the sand is.

Look at the link diversity of a single page. Do they have an abnormally high percent of their backlinks from some weird foreign domains? What do the link profiles look like for some of the most legitimate quality top ranked pages? What should you do to mimic them?

Track new links into a competing website.

Sure, the shift of a few rankings can kill some businesses. But most websites are not so reliant on any individual keyword that their business lives or dies by it. And when algorithm updates happen sometimes one type of page on your site will drop while another type of page goes up – with the net effect being a wash. For strong, well-established sites, the search game generally tends to be far less risky and far slower moving than it is made out to be.

Might Google enter your market? Or block it? Absolutely. But you can prepare in advance by differentiating your content and/or your business models in ways that you know Google won’t. For example, Blekko is a beta search engine co-created by Rich Skrenta which is building a business model on transparency. It won’t be easy for Google to match that without changing some of their fundamental philosophies about search. If such opportunities exist today within search, then they exist in almost any market.

Google owns YouTube and Bing pushed into lyrics, but other sites create personalized radio stations or ask users for song meanings.

With a low risk offline business, you could always run into loans being called, zoning issues, legal regulations, government regulations on health care increasing your operating costs, landlords jacking prices, construction, slowdown of the local area leading to crime, a deeper pocketed competitor which practices price dumping, miss investing in a key productivity technology, etc. The entire monetary system is warped to benefit few at the expense of many. There are real risks to any business, but the fatter your margins are and the more flexible you are, the easier it is to survive sharp changes in the market.

I have a retail client whom I have worked with in a profit share relationship for about five years. The recession created by the collapse of the real estate bubble certainly hurt sales and profits, but because we had low fixed costs (hosting, SSL certificate, a few ads) and flexible variable costs (mainly ads & a few other items that were directly tied to unit sales) we were able to run lean and mean and still keep the business profitable throughout the downturn.

Multiple competitors who run brick and mortar shops went bankrupt, driving up our share of the smaller overall market. Other than flexibility and efficiency, there is not much difference between a drop shipper  and a company which manages stock.

Staying safe outside of search

Even if you do get burned in the search game, there are other ways to diversify online:

• build brand awareness
• build repeat distribution outside of search (using content, social media, affiliate marketing & advertising)
• run specials & promotions
• build websites in other verticals (perhaps even some counter cyclical ones)
• re-purpose content for sale or to wrap in information

And the beauty of building up those additional channels is that they less reliant you are on search, the more likely search engines will be to trust & rely on your content. And when they do that, so do users – sometimes too much!

But you have to start somewhere. Adding value is a great thing to say, but the phrase is often meaningless. Even if you do something that adds value to the web then many people will start cloning it right away, and if they have more distribution than you do, they will take ownership of your idea. This can even happen to established reputable webmasters with a decade of experience!

If your goal is to keep adding value and hope that someone eventually notices, you are probably in for a sad surprise. More likely than not the person who notices and cares the most will compete against you. The business world is full of fake investors, fake friends, fake partners, and publicity stunts. That perhaps sounds cynical, but it is a reflection of how the web works. In other words, creating value by itself is a hollow and pointless process.

What you really want to create is profits. But on a network of (nearly) infinite competition that can be quite the challenge:

you can talk about how everyone entrepreneur is so focused on building ad-supported businesses, but that’s not going to make the penny gap disappear. Ultimately,pricing and demand are consumer driven. The economics of online media are based on the foundation of the market and individual firms only have a few levers.

So how does one go about creating lasting profits? It is not just about creating strong rankings. Indeed, our company has competitors with larger businesses who have worse rankings. It is not just the rankings that matter. What really matters is how well you connect with people and how much they trust you. As an individual, you can only connect with so many people, so you may as well choose who you want to be connected with. As we hire more people we can grow, but one of the easiest ways to add lasting value is by adding constraints to your strategy like scarcity.

Almost everyone who has a website which offers valuable links has been sent hundreds to thousands of link request emails, and almost everyone is aware of the value of links. So if you want to compete long-term, the key is to help foster brand evangelists and people who care enough to stand up for you when someone else abuses you for their own gain. If you don’t show up for work for a few days or you don’t update your blog for a month, you want people to send you complaints asking what is wrong. If someone’s account gets locked out while you are sleeping, you want to wake up to 3 emails from them from the few hours you were asleep because they are telling you how much they care about what you offer.

If you are selling something, you need to create far more perceived value than what you charge because the only time people will purchase is when there is a perceived double inequality of value (people don’t make a $100 investment hoping to get exactly $100 back.) So how do you make people really care about what you do? Rather than focus exclusively on value, focus on emotions. The market for something to believe in is infinite.

Today, I read a sales message from someone slagging SEO as something that will eventually become irrelevant. The most interesting part of his revelations was the exact same guy was warning people off of SEO with the exact same sales material back when I first got started in the industry. Anyone using his system (no matter how ugly the site designs look or how poor the content) is doing things the right way. Whereas almost everyone else is a spammer whose day will soon come.

Lucky for me (and many smart people like you), we ignored his advice, and as a result we have made millions in revenues doing something that was allegedly impossible or about to end. To have lasting profit margins, you have to see value where others do not see it. When the Google founders started Google the conventional wisdom was that your search only needed to be 80% as good as the competition’s to be good enough. How did that work out?

I am happy when I see people denounce SEO as useless because that means the market opportunity will exist that much longer for you and I. Once everyone concedes to the value of SEO, then there will be limited competitive advantage.

Most businesses are lucky to run a 10% profit margin, and there are some online businesses operating at above 90% margins. Will that last forever? Of course not. How could it?

Business is a lot like life. “On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero” – Fight Club. Businesses and business models have seasons. Maybe we are in the late summer to early fall of the SEO industry lifetime, but it’s hard to tell. I thought that was where we were when I got started back in 2003. And yet things couldn’t have went any better over the last 7 years – even in the face of the worst world-wide economic crisis in 70 years.

What if SEO does one day become less viable? The presumption from those who rip on it is that all SEOs are a one trick pony and that one day we will be standing in a line waiting on our bread. But even if the market does grow more complex, it doesn’t mean that you have lost the money you have already made, or that the websites you have built up are suddenly zeroed out in the marketplace. I look at SEO as a chance to increase profit margins for existing businesses and as a chance to get new businesses into the search game.

If after 5 years of being in the game, the site hasn’t developed beyond being just an SEO play then the site owner wasn’t very interested in building a long-term business. But as you increase your cash flow and build relationships in the marketplace, you become your own leading competitor as it is up to you if you want to develop just another arbitrage play, or something that stands the test of time.

One of my favorite keyword research tools to use before hitting the publish button is the Google search results. At a glance, you can quickly see:

1. related keywords people search for
2. related keywords competitors are optimizing for
3. related keywords Google likes

Google Suggest

Google Suggest automatically tries to complete search queries to list other keywords that people search for which contain those keywords.

Notice on how the following 2 images there are some relevant patterns amongst the keywords. These are likely good keywords to…

• include in your page title, OR
• include in your page copy, OR
• use as inspiration when making more targeted deeper pages

And since these are keywords that Google is choosing to show end users you know that some people are searching for them, Google thinks they are relevant, and some people who see the suggestions will search for what is being suggested.

Google Suggest pulls in related search data on the fly, so you can easily compare common variations of the plural and singular versions of a keyword in only a few seconds.

Analyzing page titles of ranked search results

Not every competitor is going to have a savvy search strategy, but those who do have search savvy often put their keywords and keyword modifiers directly into their page titles. Let their research help guide your own.

You can also look at the ad copy of AdWords ads to see what offers and ideas they are promoting. Who are they trying to appeal to? What makes their offer unique enough to stand out and pull in enough clicks to make it profitable enough to keep buying the ads?

Related searches

At the bottom of the search results Google typically displays related search queries

In the left rail options panel Google has a Wonder Wheel option, which allows you to visually click through keyword variations to dig deeper.

The left rail also offers another related search option, which lists additional keywords.

Take it one step further

The good news is that many of the above features (or variations of them) are available from most search engines, so you can grab related keyword ideas from Bing, Ask, and Yahoo!. The reasons search engines try to push searchers to search on a consistent set of keywords are:

• due to few matching pages (and lots of search spam) organic search relevancy on the longtail is hard
• if people are searching more on the core keywords, that makes it much easier for advertisers to get in bidding wars on the most important keywords

Based on those two reasons, I expect search engines will only grow more aggressive at suggesting relevant keywords to searchers.

If you find following the strategy of one particular competitor consistently effective then you can look at their site and use a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth to crawl their website and see what other areas they are having success in that you may have missed.

Another option would be to download competitive research data from a tool like Compete.com, and then put those keywords into a rank checker to see if you are ranking well for them, or if you need to create content targeting them.

And a list of advertisers and bids might look like:

• Advertiser 1: $10.00
• Advertiser 2: $9.50
• Advertiser 3: $3.25
• Advertiser 4: $2.75

Based on this publicly accessible information, marketers created bid gap management software where, in the above example a new advertiser might bid $9.49 to stick the top 2 advertisers with expensive click prices, while only being required to spend $3.26 per click.

Most major ad networks have since hidden bid data and incorporated ad quality measurements which include criteria such as ad clickthrough rate. This rendered most bid gap management tools useless, but the concept of bid gap management can also be applied to the organic search results.

Since unveiling their universal search results, Google has constantly tried to show resluts from vertical databases more frequently. In an interview last November, Marissa Mayer stated: “When we launched [universal search], it was showing in about one in 25 queries. Today, it shows in about 25 percent of queries. And we think there are probably times when those auxiliary [file] formats could actually help, and we aren’t triggering them on our results page. That’s something we need to continue to strive to do.”

Yes, the top few search results get most of the clicks, but integration of the vertical search results can significantly alter click distribution. In the past, Google displayed shopping search results at position #4 for many search queries. Recently, they tested moving it up to position #3, and a friend of mine who had a double listing at #1 and #2 saw this huge increase in traffic

From the results above, I can only presume that as searchers saw the product results at postion #3, they felt that those results were either somewhat irrelevant or that the shopping results were a bit of a barrier which psychologically stated “hey the right result was the site above here.”

If you have a #1 ranking and a second listing that is within striking distance of the top 10, then it is worth pushing that second page harder to get the above type of benefit.

The vertical databases not only alter click distribution on the remaining listings, but also tend to be easy ways to get exposure on broader search queries that you might not have been able to compete for. For one of the more competitive search results that a client’s site ranks for, there are image search results integrated inline. Almost without trying (when compared to how hard it was to rank the regular site in the regular listings) these [image results] were easy to rank for. And then, they were apparently easy for automated blogspot blogs wrapped in AdSense ads to hijack based on hotlinking.

Roughly 1 in 13 Google search results show a local map, and if you look at one of their new beta formats, some of the test maps took up more space than ever. And Google seems to keep testing new beta local ad strategies.

As you see Google test new vertical search locations, view them as additional opportunites to get exposure, but also look at them as potential visual barriers which redirect attention upwards. If the fall off between positions 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 is 20% to 30% then, when you add in a vertical search result the difference between 1 rank might be as much as 100%, depending on if you are above or below those vertical search results.

Given that, sometimes seeing a visual abstract of the market can help you better understand your market position (or at least allow C-level executives understand it better).

Web analytics

The first place to start is always your own web analytics. It shows you what is working for your site, how well it is working, and where you might want to focus more energy. It also helps alert you to when new trends emerge, and historical information to guide next year’s performance. The powerful thing about this data is it is proprietary (so others typically can’t access it) and it is specific to your site.

There are lots of ways to slice and dice web analytics from an SEO perspective:

• overall site traffic & traffic trends
• average rank for a keyword
• traffic associated with the rank
• the number of pages pulling in unique visitors
• the pages which pull in the most traffic
• how each of those data points relates to your business

Where it gets really meaningful is when you tie these types of data in with other tools. In aggregate, the data allows you to score your site against the rest of the market.

Want to see how much traffic your site is compared to a competing website?

Compete.com makes it easy to quickly compare website traffic profiles against each other.

Some other cool features Compete includes:

• listing top keywords on a per site basis
• listing estimated traffic percentages from top traffic sources
• listing traffic distribution per keyword on a broad match or exact match basis

Is the data perfect? No. But if you compare it against your analytics data, it can give you a good idea how strong competing sites are and where they might be beating you. And a bunch of other services like Google AdPlanner, Quantcast, and Alexa keep leveraging sharing more data to try to win marketshare in the competitive market.

Which site is ranking for more valuable keywords?

SEM Rush provides historical charts of the number of keywords in their database that a site ranks for, and estimated value of those rankings.

Once again, this data may have major sampling issues and it is quite hard to estimate the value of the ranking without knowing the business model behind the site, but they are still great graphs for helping to visualize how your site competes against other sites in your industry.

Which site has more links?

For now, Yahoo! is providing link data, but when that goes away, we will likely still be able to get data from MajesticSEO, Linkscape, and perhaps a few other tools that will be on the market by the time that happens. But what is more important than raw link counts, is how many domains are linking at a given website. MajesticSEO shares that datapoint in our SEO toolbar and provides slick historical link graphs:

Again, they will have some sampling errors due to crawling variances, pages being removed from the web, etc. But in aggregate, over time, it is quite a useful measuring stick, and you can compare the month to month growth of sites against each other.

If a competitor had one month of solid link growth, you can then try to search Google news and the search results from that time frame to see what they did to get all those links. You can’t beat them just by following them, but you can always draw inspiration from ideas and greatly improve upon them!

It is far easier to go where the conversation is than it is to create demand from scratch. This is why so many forms of affiliate marketing (reviews, coupons, comparisons, etc.) thrive on arbitraging established brands. If part of your marketing strategy revolves around community, discussion, and citations (links) then it helps to build your business model around where the conversation already is and what is already interested in.

Topics like sports and baseball cards are easy to build communities around because there is a constant stream of new stats, lots of media coverage, and some billion-dollar brands people are interested in. The phrase armchair quarterback shows how much people love talking about football. And fantasy sports take it one step further by allowing people to compete against each other…further tying them into the game – often with some bets and/or pride on the line.

When I think of the other topics I read about a lot, they are also ones that are rapidly changing with lots of news and opinions and stats. DNJournal is a weekly score card for the domain industry. Every week, I look there and go “what was this person thinking?” and “wow they got a steal.” Domain names represent language, which is constantly changing. As the economy went to crap, bankruptcy.com increased in value.

The same patterns hold true for keyword rankings in SEO. There is always something new to talk about because the structure of the web keeps changing, and the search engines are forced to change along with it. With each algorithmic shift, the search engines make marketers look for more clever ways to exploit it for profit – looking for everything from how to rank for higher value keywords right on through to how to cheaply and reliably spam the longtail of search.

Stocks, finance, and macro-economics are the same way as well. Every day is a new set of stats, and media is skewed to represent the interests of existing business models. Most of the media is built off of constantly selling that now is the time to buy. If you are not that well known, are new to an industry, or have limited resources behind you, it is easy to view that as a disadvantage.

But sometimes those lack of ties give you the freedom to speak truth, which make you different and remarkable. Once markets become fairly established, many players become so conflicted that there is value in being different.

Wherever you see holes in competing models that represents an opportunity to be different. Niche contrarian investor blogs like The Big Picture, Market Ticker, and Zero Hedge have become so popular that they helped lead to the launch of the recently named SEO contrarian blog. So far it has been a great read, much like JohnOn.

Three thoughts from an SEO perspective:

• What keeps changing in your market that people love to talk about?
• What stats could you create that would be remarkable and mention-worthy?
• What prevents your competitors from being honest? What can’t they write about that you can?

And if you can’t answer those questions, then it’s worth subscribing to a few more feeds until you can.

Profitable client projects

Some client projects are a slam dunk; where after a half hour of research, you see opportunities (including site structure, page titles, on page optimization, competitive research, and content ideas) that guarantee a multi-thousand percent ROI. SEO is the most explosive and has the highest returns when there is an already successful company that is in the game, but has not given a second thought to SEO.

All of the footprints (customers, customer interactions, customer lists, word of mouth marketing, organic links, a traffic stream outside of search, etc.) that comes along with having a successful company, works as a foundation which helps the SEO efforts boost the site even higher into the search results. As a bonus, those existing footprints on the web are also the hardest for competitors to clone. Once you have them, you have a lasting competitive advantage.

It is easier to take a website from page 2 or 3 of the search results to the top than it is to start building from scratch. In fact, many of the smartest SEO practitioners are willing to launch a site that is half done just so they can get it a few links and get it aging. Google likes old websites, so that is what we should give them.

Brutally ugly client projects

Conversely, the worst websites to work for (especially as client projects) are those which are not unique, those that are brand new, and those that tend to be thin on content. Why? These sites have no footprint on the web. And if they are to build one, it often requires aggressive push marketing, and is moving counter to the trend in search. Matt Cutts recently went so far as making a video recommending not trying to rank a thin ecommerce site.

Worse yet, many of the thin sites are to remain thin because the owner is a blow hard who is unwilling to change. These are the types of projects that have a less than 1% chance of being profitable and enjoyable. Any SEO who has taken on a dozen or more clients, should be able to spot the toxic client types and turn down those opportunities before they become headaches.

Building your own foundation

New businesses don’t have existing links and customer relationships and business partnerships to build off of. To put it bluntly, for these types of sites, often 100% of the marketing strategy is often driven by the SEO. Worse yet, because these sites have no cashflow and no rankings, they typically have a limited SEO budget. This is why it makes sense to do your own SEO from the start if you are short on capital. SEO can provide a competitive advantage, but if it is the only competitive advantage (and if you are trying to hire an external SEO) then you should be giving the SEO a large stake in the company – as they certainly earned it.

It is not that push marketing or new sites are bad, but in competitive markets, maybe the first $20,000 to $50,000 spent on building a solid SEO foundation has little returns, and real returns are six months to a year away. In those instances where a site is brand new, unremarkable, and built on limited budget, it often makes more sense for an SEO to clone the business model, but make it more unique.

If your site is brand new and does not have any competitive advantages, then you might want to consider letting it age a bit and doing a bit of your own SEO marketing before seeking professional help. If you ask for SEO help too early with too small of a budget, you might just create competition for yourself!

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently posted about how he likes the monetization model of the Financial Times, which allows you to view up to 9 pages a month for free, and then starts charging for the 10th page and beyond if you want to consume that much information.

This model works well because it leaves the content open to the active web for linking and social media exposure while also making the content accessible for search engines to index and rank it to build up a passive latent audience. It is nearly as good as scroll cloaking from a monetization standpoint, but offers a much more credible and brand-friendly user experience.

Some people who are tech savvy will likely get around some pay restrictions. Danny Sullivan demonstrated how to read the Wall Street Journal for free, but most people will pay, just like people pay for billions of dollars of songs on iTunes that they could download for free. Insert a minor obstacle between the content and if it is popular and well-known most people will jump through it.

The loss for not using security is generally quite minimal if you have a good product at a fair price and target the right audience. Back when I sold an ebook it was available via an unencrypted and unsecure page. Over 10,000 people bought it, only about 5 people complained about the lack of security, and more than 5 people emailed me to tell me that they read it off a torrent network and then decided to buy the most current version.

Did the lack of DRM mean that I had to deal with a few dozen people who bought the ebook and then asked for a refund within 3 minutes of their purchase? Absolutely. But very few actually did. The end result of the model was more sales and more satisfied customers. I left the ebook unencrypted because that created a better customer service and I knew that any distribution via theft & sharing would act as free marketing and prevent me from having to deal with many of the worst potential customers.

In search, some people are great at getting lots of traffic, while yet another group of people are great at turning traffic into cash. It is a rare talent to be good at both, and I think many people in the SEO industry put too much focus on traffic and not enough on profits. I was certainly a member of the under-monetizer club, and have just recently started giving up my cool kids badge.

The three ways I have been able to do blend the free and paid models so far have been:

• Using the link equity from well-linked to pages to subsidize the rankings of pages that are commercially focused
• Splitting the content in half & making the first half free
• Launching for free, but erecting a barrier to entry after the content is well-established.

The first method is part of the classic affiliate model. You do something that is remarkable to pull in links, and the rising tide from that effort helps lift the rankings of all other pages on your site. If Google has to chose between ranking 5 approximately equivalent sites then the site which also has some well-linked content published on it will typically win.

When I wrote a post about the Google Vince update I knew it was going to cause a stir. I wanted the exposure, but also wanted it to generate revenues. The solution I came up with was to make the first half free and the second half part of our paid content, and market the premium content at the bottom of the free post with “Want to read the rest of our analysis? If you are a subscriber you can access it here.” The post earned a couple thousand inbound links, a response video from Matt Cutts, and it brought in a couple dozen new subscribers to our site. Not a bad return for about 4 hours of work.

For a while we had a pop up ad on the SEO Book site, but I didn’t much like it, and many visitors complained about it. We instead decided to remove the pop up and shift some of our free Firefox extensions to require registration on the site in order to download them. This was accomplished by adding php if/else statements on the download page that verified the person was logged into a free account on our site before allowing them to download the tools.

The extensions already have tons of inbound links and great rankings, and using this strategy enables us to offer the option of getting our auto-responder to people downloading the tools. The tool download page also markets our paid services and we use our affiliate software to track sales. We have tracked many paid sign-ups through the tool download page, taking our free tools from a loss leader marketing channel to something that can pay for itself while offering free promotion & exposure to the site.

How do you blend free and paid? What have you found that works well for you?

This same sort of advertising blend amongst media and advertisers is popular in virtually every media format. Television stations run fake news. Some magazine ads are designed to look like editorial content because that converts better. Popular online media sites ranging from WebMD (example) to the Wall Street Journal (example) publish ads on their site that lead to special advertising sections. If you miss the small “sponsored resource” disclaimer, you might think you are reading editorial content. Some ads even start off with a free editorial quiz that leads to an ad at the end (example). [Editor's note: this column may have a sponsor disclosure as determined by the publisher, and is not necessarily endorsed by the author.]

When I started writing online, some niche publications would not give me the time of day until I gave them some ad dollars, at which point in time I suddenly became an expert. And another set of people ignored me until Danny Sullivan linked to an article I wrote in late 2003. After he linked to my site, a lot of other people trusted me (somewhat) because they saw him cite me.

If your first entrance into the world of marketing is SEO, then it is easy to get taken back by how sausage-like media business models are. Google’s search guidelines for webmasters present an oversimplified view of the web because it suits their business model to do so. In such a world, a large percent of sites that rank violate their guidelines because to some degree that is where the competitive line is. Either you rank or you do not.

What separates the type of companies that can violate guidelines and rank vs those that get immediately punished is often how much other marketing they do and the relative size of their footprint. If a site is promoted through nothing but spammy techniques, then Google is not going to have much sympathy. But if a site is strong on the brand front, strong on the public relations front, and strong on the editorial front, and strong on the organic links front then it gets more room to fudge with the guidelines.

About a year ago, Todd Malicoat wrote an article about how brand size plays a role in SEO. If you are brand new to the web you might not have the money to invest  in brand building, but you still can build a strong foundation by investing in a strong web design and a strong domain name. It is hard to build a brand or get many organic links until you have a way to drive traffic to your website. Below I have listed 7 compelling (and relatively inexpensive) ways you can invest in pulling links (and other credibility signals) into your website.

1. Create featured content. Every page of your site should not have the same cost. Some pages of featured content should be much deeper than your typical content such that people think they are so much better than everything else that they feel the articles are citation-worthy.
2. Outbound links. When creating featured content, one of the best ways to help it spread to the right audience is to reference some of the thought leaders in that space directly in the content. That enables you to pitch them without seeming like you are pitching them.
3. Advertise on non-commercial keywords. Many non-commercial keywords are cheap because they have little to no direct business value. But some of them are often associated with ideas that are often talked about in the media. If you can create featured content and then advertise it on Google for about a dime a click, that can pull in a lot of links. One of our sites got links from the New York Times and the Washington Post using this technique.
4. Buy ads on sites that rank. Some sites that rank are not owned by people who know much about business. Some of them will want unbelievable prices for ads, whereas some others will sell ads for about 5% of the market rate. Buy the deals and skip the overpriced stuff.
5. PRLeads. If you have a smaller website and can not afford traditional forms of advertising or a big PR firm, then you can try to get quotes in the media by subscribing to PR Leads. It costs about $100 a month and you get to list topics where you would be a good fit for a quote. Media members ask for quotes via email and you respond to the ones that you might be able to get quoted in. After you are quoted, you can their logos on your site in an “as seen in” section.
6. Clean user experience. Some ad driven sites are able to get momentum quicker if they do not run ads on their site until after they start building an audience. Run ads too aggressively, too early and it might turn people off, plus if a site has little to no audience then it won’t make much money from ads. But if you build a lot of links and momentum first, it is much easier to make money from ad based business models.
7. Free samples. A decent link can cost $50 to $500. Many products and services sell for less than that. And some products (like software) have virtually 0 cost to distribute. So if you can find out a way to get your product or service in the hands of thought leaders, then that will typically have a  much better return on investment than traditional advertising does. If you mostly run an ad driven media site, then writing guest articles for other sites that have your target audience is a great way to get exposure in front of the right people.