I was recently talking to some VC's and asked what they thought of my one-page business plan concept. (We're not sending it out to VC's yet.) They loved the idea though. They also said that they believe that a well crafted business plan should be less than 9 pages.
They also distinguished between an operational plan and a business plan, saying most combine them. The "how" you are going to accomplish your goals can be in a separate document for later.
If you're selling things, you might consider an affiliate program. In one of my startups, I had a couple of hundred affiliates signed on before I launched by giving away free copies. It resulted in hundreds of thousands in income the week we launched. Most of the sales came from the top 20 affiliates.
Potential affiliates are not hard to come by and you only pay if they perform. Just pretend you are a customer, search for your product/service in Google and contact everyone who is on the first page as ads or natural search and give them a copy of your product and ask them to promote it if they like it in exchange for a healthy commission. They've got the traffic, and many of them probably don't know how to monetize it.
It also helps to suggest ways for them to promote your product. For instance supplying custom emails for them to send out to their list, promoting it in their blog, adding your product as an up-sell when their customers buy their stuff from them etc.
You can also setup things like cross-promotional auto-responder messages, where you have a message in your auto-responder promoting them, and they do the same for you. No commissions required.
It all depends on what you're doing. If I knew what you were doing, I'd have much better advice.
Despite what at least one person said, article writing is a great way of getting natural traffic and being slowly gaining traction in Google. It just takes time and has to be done right. Don't over post and make sure you post it to your own site and get it indexed by the search engines before syndicating it.
There are other things you can do as well, like buying domain names that have pagerank and putting content on them that references your site. Risky if you ask me. Google will eventually black-list everyone who does that sort of thing.
While I've been monitoring hackernews since it was profiled on TC, I still haven't quite figured out all the rules of how it works.
Am I breaking protocol by alerting of the occasional blog post at MyStealthStartup.com? I've done that once before, over a week ago, thinking some of the audience here would find it useful. Thanks.
This comment scared me. I don't believe these are affiliate links and I don't want to have anything that can let people track me down yet. I just copied the links from Amazon to the books I've read and found exceedingly helpful.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/