Before you invest money in SEO, links or any other form of online marketing, I strongly recommend that you first spend some time buying Google Adwords for your site and track the conversion-to-sales-or-signup ratio of various keywords (you can also use Yahoo Search Marketing).
Once you know what percentage of visitors for each keyword will end up as customers, and how much money you make (on average) from each customer, you can then accurately determine exactly what you can afford to spend for each visitor, and you’ll know which keywords result in visitors that convert to customers, and which ones are just a waste of time.
The amazingly accurate marketing data you can get almost instantly and inexpensively with Pay-Per-Click campaigns is something you could not have bought for any amount of money 5 or 10 years ago.
There is a famous quote attributed to John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Using Google or Yahoo PPC you can give a pretty good idea of what will work and what won’t before you spend and/or waste any money.
Based upon work with our Internet Marketing firm’s client base, I’ve discovered that creating content and links on an existing domain far outweighs the benefit of creating a new site - even if the site’s content is more relevant.
When targeting a new keyword remember that it makes more sense to generate a new directory/page on an existing site (Site A) with good PageRank than it does to create a completely new domain and site (Site B).
Even the eventual links from Site B to Site A aren’t worth the credit Site A will get for having deep links.
Web directories used to be a fantastic resource for getting inbound links to your website and thus increasing your search engine rankings for targeted keywords. Today, the ranking effect of this practice is a hot topic of debate.
This list was giving to me recently as directories that still “work”. I’m not sure how effective submissions to these sites will be but here’s the list anyway . . . 
www.jayde.com
www.ipl.com
www.vlib.com
www.illumirate.com
www.xoron.com
www.webworldindex.com
www.aardvarkbusiness.com
www.netinsert.com
www.thedirectorysite.com
www.capterra.com
www.thesoftwarenetwork.com
www.buzzle.com
www.qango.com
www.bizweb.com
www.chiff.com
www.dc2net.com
www.mavicanet.com
www.monemission.com
www.searchtheweb.com
www.topsearch.com
www.turnpike.net
www.websavvy.cc
www.worldhot.com
www.joeant.com
www.skaffe.com
www.gimpsy.com
www.goguides.org
www.qango.com
www.linkopedia.com
www.allestra.com
www.americasbest.com
www.arieles.com
www.azoos.com
www.directory-search.org
www.mastersite.com
www.pharos-search.com
www.sunstream.com
www.webworldindex.com
www.business.com
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January 29th, 2007 — General, Internet Business, Articles, Internet Marketing, SEO
Writing articles and submitting them to “article directories” is a great way to gain attention for your websites (especially by the search engines).
When you submit your article, you agree to give other website owners free use of your content. In exchange, they give you credit as the article’s author as well as a link to your site.
Following is a list of websites that you can submit your article to:
Goarticles.com
Articlecity.com
Ideamarketers.com
Afreepress.com
Articlewarehouse.com
ezinearticles.com
Amazines.com
Isnare.com
Articlehub.com
Alumbo.com
Clickforcontent.com
Theallineed.com
Articlesfree.com
December 19th, 2006 — General, Cool, Online Resources
This site helps you find music simliar to music you already like. Stated on the site:
“Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like?
Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.
We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.”
Pandora.com
December 8th, 2006 — General
The link below has the information needed to rent out the house. Please contact me directly for dates of availability . . .
http://digitalpipelines.com/rental/
July 13th, 2006 — General, Online Resources
This place will buy old CD’s. My friend (Pippen) just traded in his already-ripped CD and got $5 for many of them. He wasn’t using them anyway and made a cool $369 so he can buy a newer/better ipod . . .
Sell Your Old CD’s Here
December 20th, 2005 — Internet Business, Articles
A fantastic article for anyone interested in using a web site to generate revenue:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
November 15th, 2005 — Online Resources
Use this site to see what your phone/cell number spells . . .
http://www.phonespell.org/