One of the problems I have with reading TC is that its like sitting at a table listening to a bunch of greedy young upstart lawyers gossiping about how much money they will make in the coming year while in the next breath laughing about who was just made redundant, then reaffirming to themselves why they are so smart. But that's lawyers for you!  

Getting editorial coverage to launch your startup can be a tough task with the sheer number of new startups launching every day. So much so that many startups think nothing of paying for a little editorial coverage here and there and most importantly for the link love especially as buying links is a normal part of a seo business these days.

However, companies such as PayPerPost have been vigorously attacked for moving into this space by the likes of Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, claiming that the entire blogging communities reputation would be trashed as readers would no longer 'trust' blogs such as his TC.

TC is one of the larger blogs covering the tech sector, but there are many who aren't so impressed with the TC angle and are now competing for this space. TC enjoyed a wave of early success being one of the first off the block, but this early success brought with it the arrogance of youth and the ignorance of a mountain climber who cant see the drop past the apex.

One of the problems I have with reading TC is that its like sitting at a table listening to a bunch of greedy young upstart lawyers gossiping about how much money they will make in the coming year while in the next breath laughing about who was just made redundant, then reaffirming to themselves why they are so smart. But that's lawyers for you!

The real problem I have though is from the point of view of a startup developer. Success online is not granted by MA as a result of being featured on the likes of TC alone but rather it is earned over the long tail of the internet. The search engines are the authentic makers & breakers of online ventures and the real game in town is SEM and SEO. Being in the right place at the right time is the ONLY way to reach your market.

Sure getting a spike of traffic from a big feature as such will test your servers load capacity but the customer base is probably totally wrong to build any business from such a spike and MA himself has admitted as much here.

Positioning your startup so that it will be found as and when needed is the secret to success and that is what Google has capitalised upon. Googles organic results will feature those who their algorithms claim are the authorities for a given sector. Links are at the heart of these algorithms and as far as Google are concerned gaming is the root of all evil for their business model that requires the losers paying for top advertising positions.

Needless to say if your in the game for the long hall then the natural search results is where you want to be and for this you need links from a broad spectrum of different servers. Having one PR0 (the typical TC link) link will have a negligible effect on these results. Rather depending on the keyword phrases one is competing for you are likely to need 500 or so such links to be well positioned in the organic results and even then it still will take about a year for those links to count.

There are some great new sites that have emerged to feature the launches of startups where you can start your link building / editorial campaign and here I will list a few of the interesting ones that I have found.


Killer StartUps is one of my favorites, this well thought out site allows users to submit their own sites or those that they have found and it is fast becoming one of the main players on the stage although I am not a fan of the user based voting system that has been incorporated because these gadgets are 1) subject to gaming 2) do not reflect the opinions of the authorities.


The Museum of Modern Betas is another of the top launch pads I have found that is doing a remarkable job of indexing and listing all of the startups that are launching daily. Bookmark this site.


Startups in india is a great contender that has some unique features and is focused on networking and launching startups based in India. I very much like the video collection here http://startups.in/exchange/

Great for lawyers to read about industry gossip but generally editorial is restricted to startups that have either been funded with VC or who have just gone bust.


PayPerPost allows startups to get a little paid coverage (links), and maybe more importantly allows some little blogs another source of revenue.


StartUpCrunch offering startups a number of ways to get coverage, free advertising is offered for the price of registration (or a link), and anyone who has a video pitch or demo can make it to the main stage. The CrunchRank evaluation is not subject to gaming and reflects the opinion of the developer who is a tech geek with a track record of developing and running successful technology based startups.

Im sure I have missed many others and will rely on the readers to make up for my ignorance and post comments and further tips for other startups looking for editorial coverage which are posted below:
http://news.ycombinator.com/

http://reddit.com/