I read Graywolf’s SEO blog every single time he publishes a new article (I’m subscribed to his RSS feed), so when he wrote a response to Jason Calacanis’ comment about how SEO’s sucked, I had to read it. The article itself is a gem as Graywolf breaks down and critiques Mahalo, a project of Jason’s and bills itself as a community driven search engine. The point of my article though is that linkbait, a tactic to generate inbound links, comes in many forms and insulting someone is one powerful way.
It helps if you’re already relatively well known and people are listening, otherwise you’re insulting someone or something in an empty vacuum. But ultimately what you want to do is elicit an emotional response that compels someone to take action, in this case it is to respond to your post or comment and link to you.
The downside to this is that you may hurt your credibility in the process. Tons of people think Jason is a prick, I have no idea as I’ve never met the guy, so you have to be prepared to irk some people. But irk them enough to post and link. 
If you’re new to blogging and optimizing your content for search engines, you’ll be in for a bit of a surprise - blogging is a lot like gardening. You plant your seeds now but you won’t reap the bounty for at least another two months.
Why is this? It’s because Google (and the other search engines) updates its index on an irregular basis, updating things like PageRank (though that doesn’t happen nearly as regular as it used to) and the search engine results pages; so the decisions you make now won’t take effect in the search engines until much later. All the links you’re trying to earn, all the content you’re putting up, all that is great for your current readership but it won’t come into play for a little while longer for the search engines.
So, if you’re dabbling in some SEO, just be aware that the effects are like the Fed, they happen a little while after you make them.
Blogging can be very financially rewarding but that can’t be your primary focus when you first start or you might become very disenchanted very quickly. See, in the beginning you’re not going to get much traffic, so programs like Google Adsense aren’t going to give you the monetary returns that will make the time you put into it worth it. When you start, you’ll get under five or ten hits a day. Of those, likely no one will click on an Adsense ad, thus you won’t earn any money. If you put up a program that pays per impression, that won’t pay out much either because ten hits is nothing.
The moral of the story is to not focus on the money at first, focus on generating good content, participating in the conversation, getting that link equity, and building your site’s brand. After all that, once you’ve gotten a foothold into the niche, that’s when the money will start coming in. At first it’ll be a trickle… but you never know.
