Do we all really spend too much time mucking around trying to be the best SEO expert?Ok lets get the highest PR...great you get a 7!! So you cn sell links for $$$$. BUT Are we all missing the point? we want to sell from our website. Who is going to buy? Not all the other webmasters, but "joe public". So how does he find us?? There is the burning question. Is it because we have a high pr? Is it because we appear high in google/msn etc? there are some very,very sucsessful people on the internet, so how did they do it? I beleive the answer is a with any business....funds to promote! You breathe in....you spend loads...you hold your breath......and wait.....was the campain good???......did it work?.........no.......spend more till it does!!! Oh.who has the answer??
IMO the answer is: And yes undeniably it gets easier with a good promotional budget... but it can be done on a shoestring (which is what most of us here are trying to do), and even with $0...
When you have links that are worth buying then the word will spread, I normally find those good sites by chance sometime or if I see a site that looks good to buy from then I will contact them asking if they are willing to sell some links off their site. You'd be shocked about the amount of good sites out there that have not even thought about making money in that fashion off their site so sometimes you can get good quality links at a cheap price because the owners do not know any better.
You can do SEO and direct marketing for effective sales. Direct marketing like Google Adwords. And optimizing your site to be on top of search engine for your targeted keywords.