1. RSS still exists and is used. It does not drive traffic like the 'social' sites do, however. 2. >There is no way to get backlinks, no way to get ranking, no

1. RSS still exists and is used. It does not drive traffic like the 'social' sites do, however. 2. >There is no way to get backlinks, no way to get ranking, no way to rank without an enormous team of experts guiding your efforts. The internet is maturing as a business space. It's going to just get more capital intensive from here. Pitch people to get backlinks. Schmooze. Make pals. 3. Be more creative and willing to spend money for effective traffic. The old days were not some magical time of freedom. People passed packets of $500+ for each link to bloggers and journalists. They still do. People just don't talk about it in public. Now that the marginal value of a backlink is a lot lower than it used to be people have to turn to other techniques to build traffic and integrate it into a more complex marketing mix. I do think that it's a shame that publishing on the web is becoming just as professionalized as print / TV / etc. used to be. You do need a big staff of techno-priests to interpret the word of Cutts and implement it. To burnish my priestly credentials, I notice that you're not using authorship markup on your posts. I disagree that the big sites are un-topplable. Identify niches in their business that you can break off profitably. The big dogs can't own everything, especially given the relevance of personalized search.