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Matt Cutts: Someone was joking, “Well you could steal Paris Hilton’s phone. That’s one way to get to be known online.” But that’s a little towards the notorious end not the positive way that you want to be known.

My short answer is if you make something excellent and then tell people about it whether it’s on Twitter, or FaceBook, Friendfeed, Google Buzz or whatever, that’s a really nice way to sort of let people know that there’s good stuff out there.

So I’ll give you a couple quick examples. There’s a pedometer called the Fitbit. It’s an expensive pedometer. It costs about $100. You can get a really good one for $30 but this one has a wireless connection where when you get within about 15 feet of the wireless base station it will automatically send the stuff that you’ve been doing, your activities online and you can do Fitbit competitions against your friends. So this is a totally new device. A wireless pedometer didn’t really exist before let alone sharing and comparing with your friends.

Another example gadget is WiThings, which is this scale that has a WI-FI component to it so you just step onto it and it will upload your weight and your fat percentage and your body weight percentage and all this sort of stuff to WiThings.com and then you can just look online.

So this is taking WI-FI and a bathroom scale and putting them and they’re just swimming in links because people are really interested in that. People are interested in something that’s a cool gadget like that.

So both of those just happen to be gadgets but if you can come up with something new or viral or it could be a resource, it could be research, it could be something funny. You could be a cartoonist. There’s a lot of ways to get to be known online and build up your reputation.

So whenever you get to be known for something, whatever it be, if it’s excellent then that will attract links naturally on its own. The challenge is stepping ahead of the crowd and sort of getting to be known and so think a little bit about the branding. “What can I do that’s different than anybody else? Can I start a blog that has a different take than anybody else?”

You know if you do these sorts of things that’s the sort of thing that attracts links, not only attracts attention but also builds your reputation so that you can sort of bolster that and do more and more things online.

Good luck!