Your New Year’s Resolution: Man Up

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of search engine optimization of failures come from the biggest search engine penalty of all: fear. Business owners and webmasters are terrified of losing their existing rankings, petrified in their rankings by the fear of retribution by the great Google. F*** fear.

1. You have no excuse not to buy links.
Sorry folks, but unless you actually believe manipulating the search results in your favor is wrong, you should be buying links. You should be buying positive reviews, you should be renting high quality, targeted text links, you should be securing sponsorships, etc.
Excuse: buying links cost money Yes, it does. So does every other form of advertising. The difference is, people who are searching for your site and find it organically Don’t Know You Are Advertising!.
Excuse: I might get banned Then go buy a new domain for $7.95 and start building links there. Which leads me to…

2. You have no excuse not to be building multiple properties
The cost of creating a new site is close to nothing. You can get a subdomain on WordPress or Blogspot if you must, or you can fit the $8 bucks for a new domain name. There are plenty of qualified free hosts for your endeavor to make sure it pays off before you move to something that costs money. Then, return to #1 above and start acquiring links. The only thing better than ranking #1 for a keyword is ranking #1 and having 3 more listings in the top 10. Having multiple properties is a key part of reputation management as well. Get started now!
Excuse: I don’t have time to manage multiple domains. Don’t worry about fresh content. Create a simple 5 pager and get it ranked. Once it is ranking, then worry about adding e-commerce. Get the visitors before you invest.

2010 is here, It’s time to man-up and make some money.