There is nothing more crucial to successfully bootstrapping your business than free marketing. This is my personal check list for every website I start. Not only will this drive traffic to your businesses web presence, but can also get you a free high ranking Google listing.
From what I hear, having a link to your website on the first page of a Google search is a good thing! 
To get that result for under $10 month well that’s just phenomenal. This is all done by simply piggy backing on sites that Google already loves.
YouTube.com
Make a 1-2 minute commercial for your service/product. People will bump into it here and there plus you can use it later for your website to have a rich media experience for your visitors.
Gcast.com
Make a free podcast about your service/product. Talk about features, benefits, how to use it, and have customers talk about how much they like it also.
Myspace.com
Create a business profile and interact with people. This is particularly great if you are in the retail industry. There are thousands of niche groups on Myspace find the one for your industry and introduce yourself.
Article Marketing:
This is where you can get your really high Google listings if done right. Write a 300-500 word article selling your service/product and make sure to use the right keywords. There are tons of sources out there that can teach you how to find and exploit the right keywords. That would be a whole other article itself. Basically, you just stick your keyword/phrase in the article title and throw it in the body of the article about 4-5 times also. Make sure to include a link to your site/s in the “about the author” box.
Isnare.com (Paid bonus features)
These are the only four article sites you should worry about as Google has an affection for these. The others wouldn’t hurt but also wouldn’t help much either.
Classified Ads:
Use the same concepts as article marketing and you can secure a high listing with these sites as well. The downside is that classified ads generally go away after 30-45 days. Some have a feature where you can pay a small amount of money to have it re-posted over and over again. Well worth it if you can spare the cash.
Backpage.com (Paid bonus features)
UsFreeAds.com (Bonus features for $9/month)
Well there you have it, my personal Internet marketing checklist. If you are not using any of these techniques you could be missing out on 100-1000 free visitors a day to your businesses web presence.
Awesome advice, Justin! I think that one of the best things that a blogger/entrepreneur can do is to submit their articles to EzineArticles. Now some people may say that it can hurt your listings with google, due to fact that you are re-listing the same content onto the open web again…but I’m not too sure if google will punish you for that… What do you think? Also, richdad.com forums is a good place to post articles as well.
From my knowledge of SEO the duplicate content rule only applies to same sites or same server situations. What happens is it confuses the SE robots, and then a human is notified of the problem. The human then checks into and if you are doing something “seedy” you get penalized.
That being said I think you’ll be ok sharing your content with public services like article directories. It’s not the robots, from what I have read, that will penalize you. It’s when a human editor checks into it. They decide whether you provided more value or less value to society.
Worst case scenario:
Only one copy of the info gets listed the others get banned. If you did it right you will have a link on that copy anyways so essentially no harm.
Cool, thanks for the explanation. Much appreciated.