Momentum is one of the hardest things to gain in SEM if you’re starting with nothing. You have no sister sites to uplink with, nor any other networks you can drop a link on. You’re forced to do everything manually (or pay someone else obviously) without any head start what so ever. How exactly should [...]

Momentum is one of the hardest things to gain in SEM if you’re starting with nothing. You have no sister sites to uplink with, nor any other networks you can drop a link on. You’re forced to do everything manually (or pay someone else obviously) without any head start what so ever. How exactly should you get started? What should your first move be? How can you keep it going?

There’s a few things you can do. Let’s start on the free (and legal) side.

• Submit your site to Social Bookmarking sites
• Submit your site to Directories.
• Find sites to request a link for, this takes a lot of time usually.
• Write or obtain a free tool to link spam with
• Spam sites yourself.
• Leave comments on blogs and/or forums.

Now on the slightly paid side, I highly highly suggest the following:

• Social Bookmarking submissions (Personally I use Red_Virus) Price: 100 submits / ~$25
• Directory Submissions (same) Price: 500 submits/~$35 – 1000 submits/~$65
• Blog Commenting
• Purchasing Stumbles
• Purchasing Diggs
• etc…

Each of these can help you get started on your momentum, but let’s talk about how this will help you in the future once you start rollin’ down the hill.

The whole goal of getting the momentum going is that when you have your first site that achieves what I call “eagle eye” is when you start spreading it out. Eagle eye is a term that I use when I can go to a site or blog, post some content and in about 30 minutes it’s already updated on the Google index. The term derived from the fact that Google watches your site like an eagle to his prey.

The best way to get a site started on it’s journey is to do the linking properly. Usually I drop a link to my new site from Stumble & Digg. That alone should get it indexed (main page) within 24 hours, and if you have a lot of dynamic pages make sure you have a sitemap configured to have it be respidered every day or every week. I have another theory that this will help for another reason, but we’ll get to that another day.

The linking should get you indexed, but now you need some good strong backlinks. Go out and find some places to leave comments. Make sure you don’t BS them … write a good constructive comment and leave your URL with your name as the anchor you want to rank for.

The main thing you need to do is set yourself goals and set a plan of attack for outranking your competition. Start with gauging what their typical increase in links is per day. If they get 150 links a month roughly and you have a base of 500 links right now and you’d like to catch them in 2 months, you need more than 800 links within those two months. Always get a goal is a tad bit out of reach so that you push yourself to excel above and beyond what you think you’ll achieve.

Setting yourself a goal for top 5 is great, but trying for top 5 and achieving 2nd place is a whole other ballgame. I know that personally I set myself a goal of increasing my profit per month by 20%. So far I’ve hit it every time, and some months even gotten 300% extra. It’s all about momentum. If done properly you’ll not only surprise yourself but push yourself higher than ever before. Always keep yourself focused on a goal and then don’t just try to meet it, but exceed it.

Always try to surprise yourself and hit goals you never hit before. That’s how you’ll get to the place you’re going, except much faster.