[tub109]

I agree. It is not the "quickest" way to market by any stretch of the imagination. The author was probably trying to make the point that if you have more time than resources (ie money, contacts) here are methods you could try to get you started.

Maybe the title could have better indicated who was the intended audience: the startup truly just starting up.

Reading around a bit it is clear they fall into this category and are experimenting with different techniques and blogging about them. So maybe it wouldn't be worth the time investment for a startup even a bit further along, but maybe worth it for a startup to get their pageviews from 0 to...not 0.