Like any investment, your website must start turning a profit as early as possible, and pulling the search engines is a critical component. Once you start building up your traffic, your search engine ratings will stabilize, and your site will slowly grow. It's a lot like starting a car – it takes a lot of energy to get it going, but once it's running it only takes maintenance energy.

Most people don't know where to start with inbound links. Do you just email webmasters and ask? Buy advertising? Or do you offer your own site up as a link farm, encouraging your hard-won customers to visit someone else? None of these are the best bet (though emailing webmasters, over time, is a good additional strategy). The best way you can get great inbound links is by using an article submission service. These services use article directories, large online repositories of articles donated by webmasters like you, to build backlinks to your site. Each article you donate contains a resource box that points back to your website, in whatever format you desire. And you can donate the same article to hundreds of article directories.