Alternative Step 1.–6.: Do something worthy of attention, instead of spending time following dubious SEO techniques.

This article is from May 2009. Your startup no longer needs a Delicious, friendfeed or Mixx account. Half of the other steps are nearly irrelevant.

Step 0: Find a customer.

Agree with other commenters, re: more important things to spend your time on than this list, but WHOA.

I'm borderline offended that this article would claim that getting social media accounts for your Startup would come after ANYTHING. For me, checking availability and reserving social media accounts comes all the way back at "what should I name this thing" and am searching for domain names. Sure, some are vastly more important than others (Twitter, FB), but holy moly. And of course, picking a name comes WAY down the list after finding a business model and some customer development. But, when you get down to picking a name...

Getting/reserving FB/Twitter accounts should be part of the process in choosing a name and domain (Branding!). I've heard of bots that will try to grab your Twitter handle as soon as a domain is registered with that name.

Netflix showed this importance of this with the weed-smoking Elmo and the @Quikster fiasco.

I'm creating a very detailed list (more detailed than the OP) of marketing channels as I ramp up the marketing for my startup over the next few weeks. Email me if you are interested in using it.

Just post it on your blog?

I will.

> Boom. Instantly you have 10 links to your site.

I personally dislike Facebook Pages myself, and not inclined to make one. Still I wanted to see if they'd at least give some link-fu and just checked one... all the links are of the rel="nofollow" variety. Nowadays, I'd guess the rest of sites on the list do the same.

In short step two is a time sink for less benefit than it would appear.

Much better tips in this previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2973404

You can use something like http://knowem.com/ to automate all the namegrabbing stuff.

I'd suggest testing that you have good retention rate before doing this sort of thing, otherwise it's wasted really.

It's sad to think that quality is not always enough to get noticed.

The more I enter the startup / entrepreneurship world, the more I see bullshit is mandatory.

The problem is, sometimes we are not good at communicating (bullshit?).

>It's sad to think that quality is not always enough to get noticed.

It's not sad to think that, it's essential. "If you build it, they will come" is the fastest path to failure, an average product with great marketing will beat a great product with no marketing any day.

You need both. Your average website is only going to get visited by bots (Hi Google!) unless you do some type of marketing.