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03.26.07
Starting Promotion From Scratch
 By Aaron Wall
When I was new to the web I was excited when I would get things to rank from scratch, thinking I did a great job of SEO, but if your results are effective and consider applicable risks does it matter what techniques you used to promote a website?
None of us really start out from scratch. When I started on the web I was a recluse with low living costs, lots of time, the need to be successful, and lots of rage. Those were off the web assets that played in my favor, as well as my liking for reading and writing, and my experience selling baseball cards in high school. I also had a friend who was web savvy and made many friends on forums. Without them I would have failed online.
That is probably too much of talking about me, but consider yourself:
• what unique experiences or biases do you have?
• what resources do you lack?
• what resources do you have a lot of?
After you think of your own assets and skill sets, ask yourself if it matters how you achieve your results.
• Does it matter how you learned what you know?
• Is it better if your site is brand new? Or is it better if you bought an established site?
• Is it better if you designed your site? Or is it better if you used a free template or paid a site designer to create it?
• Is it better if your site is hand coded? Or is it better if you use an extensible content management system?
• Is it better if your site validates? Or is it better if your site renders in browsers and you spent that extra time and money to create more content?
• Is it better if you created all the content yourself? Or is it better if you paid writers to create it?
• Is it better if you sell your own product? Or is it better if you sell ad space?
• Is it better if your links are all organic? Or is it better if you bought a few topically related trusted links?
• Is it better if you rank your own site? Or is it better to buy an ad on an authoritative site and rank that page?
You learn more by doing things yourself, but you can't learn and do everything if you are trying to make a scalable business. All those points of distinction are arbitrary. Every market is gamed, and so long as your methods work it doesn't matter how you got there as long as you didn't have to hurt others to do so.
After you are profitable and growing, for many projects it makes sense to outsource tasks, including:
• website design
• content creation
• ad sales
• maybe even initial marketing, by buying old websites
Thinking that you have to do everything from scratch means that you are going to run into scale issues much quicker than a competitor who believes in outsourcing will. Once you consider opportunity cost, doing everything yourself becomes far less appealing.
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About the Author:
Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, an ebook offering the latest
search engine optimization tips and strategies. From SEOBook.com Aaron
gives away free advice and search engine optimization tools. He is a
regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and runs the
Threadwatch community.
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