Maver1ck

The most important thing I would share is the importance of FOCUS!

In the IM world, there are tons of tools, theories and strategies and a new product and forum pops up almost every week that gets flooded with more marketers and a whole new batch of newbies trying to learn how to get things done.

If you trim away the fat, getting a site ranked is not as difficult as most people make it out to be. The formula is simple.

To rank high for any site, you must have:
1) Fresh, unique content that is keyword-rich and targeted to your niche.
2) Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks...

To cut out a lot of the fluff, what I did was stop scanning the forums so much and focused only on threads that talked about content and backlinking and started investing in a few paid tools that helped with writing unique content, submitting the content to directories and then building backlinks not just to the article directories that I had just submitted to, but also my site.

Focus on those two things - writing quality, unique content and studying backlinking strategies (Web 2.0, Article Directories, Directory Submission, Social Bookmarking, Blog Commenting, etc...) WILL help you.

As a note, the most important thing that you need to do, before you even put up a site and start with content and building backlinks is do some good, quality keyword research. There is ONE good free tool that I use (Adwords) and there are a few paid tools that are top-notch... searching the forums for these tools, buying them and learning how to use them is vital. Finding quality keywords that are high traffic but low competition is the foundation of a successful IM project. If you don't do this right, everything else is in vain.