Great post, especially loved the “Street Team” idea as it really resonated with me. I know someone who tried a similar concept, getting students to post stickers with his domain name all over the city he lived in.

Soon there were stickers on walls, landmarks and tourist spots, it even got mentioned in a regional paper.

Suffice to say, he saw a massive increase in traffic, although he did suffer a bit of backlash as a result. The overall publicity he received far outweighed the negative sentiment though, so he’s put this down as a successful campaign.

Rosh

For example… you might send an email and say “I’d love to guestpost. Here is my potential topic. I was wondering if you were open to guest bloggers – if so, I’d love to send you the article I mentioned for you to read over. If you don’t end up using it, no hard feelings and I will publish it on my own blog.” – this lets them see your work (if unknown to them) without committing to publishing it and a possible sticky situation if they don’t like it.

As someone who gets guest blogging requests from others a lot, I’ve found writing on a topic of interest to me but that isn’t my specialty is more likely to catch my interest. I’m not likely to have someone guest blog on link development, but analytics or video promotion would totally excite me enough to say yes to at least reading the potential post.

So, in summary, a month or two of posts before you start finding people to link to or promote you and don’t wait a single second to get yourself out there promoting it via guest posts etc.

My two cents…