FIRST : Define what you are an expert in and how that correlates to your start-up. It’s crucial to be INTERESTING – what knowledge do you have that others would be entertained by, but feeds back into your startup solving a challenge? Doing something better / faster?

SECOND : Contact blogs in your target market category and ask nicely to guest blog, use http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/ or http://www.alltop.com or http://www.blogcatalog.com to find bloggers. Just fill out their “contact us” forms, but write each one personally.

THIRD: Write a 3 – 4 paragraph “article” giving your unique take on the problem you’re working on solving. Point out a flaw and how you’re working to correct it. Don’t be OVERTLY selling your company, but don’t let anybody miss the point that your start-up is solving that problem.

RESULTS: Our contact to post rate was for each 10 emails we got ~2 rejections, ~5 ignores, ~3 successes. For each success we wrote a unique article. Same content, written for each audience specially though.

You now have PR friendly inbound links.

You now have curious visitors in your target market.

And if you’re lucky somebody truly useful will notice and repost.