New Domains and google sandbox

Hi guys, I'm about to open my activity, it is a recording and videomaking studio. Now, my problem is: Due to the fact that I need to brand my activity, I cannot buy an old domain, I'm forced to take a new one. Because of the new domain, most of my seo efforts will be minimized due to the google "sandbox effect". But, my fortune in the misfortune, in my city seo is unknown. And for uknown I mean that we're in the middle ages here. The majority of my competitors don't even have a website, I have only two competitor websites, but they're not optimized. They haven't got nor backlinks (no more than 5-6 backlinks, and they're not that strong) nor social signals, and they haven't got not even the most basic on-page optimization, tags, keyword articles and that stuff, nothing. The only advantage they have is that they have old domains.
So, my question is: Am I able to outrank them with a brand new domain, but with a good and strong sem strategy, in about some months? Or the fact that my domain is new will penalize me that much?

Just go for new domain, you can easily outrank them.

Yes, I will surely go for a new domain because I need to estabilish my brand, so I cannot use a casual domain.
I've been thinking to a trick these days, I've seen some people doing it. They buy an old domain with some keyword they want in the domain name, and they rank it for the keywords they want. I was thinking of doing the same for some keywords with higher competition, making a small website of one or two pages, like an info page, and then redirect to my site. I would have an old domain, with even an exact match for some keywords, and I shouldn't worry of the sandbox.
Think that it can be a good idea, or will it be considered spam?

Do not build links in first 3 months!

If you do just good onpage SEO you will be on 3rd place (as you told there are only 2 other sites).

Start with links from social sites (facebook, twitter...).

After 3rd month do one press...
Wait wait wait...
Start doing guest blogging...

You don't need anything else if market is really small like you described.

If you need any help, send me PM after several month and I will analyze your link profile and help you for free.

Just create really good keyword rich content and do all the on-page stuff correctly. Then since new domain build your links slowly until it gets aged

Yeah if you really live in the middle of nowhere onsite SEO will be enough to rank your site. With that said, the sandbox effect is just a sign of people doing bad SEO. I know people who rank new websites in hours. I'm a little more conservative, but never have to wait a month to see rankings unless the site's been slapped b/c of what a previous owner did (on EMDs that become available that is).

onpage seo + socials ... as you are in the videomaking business adding your link to your YT channel and sharing some vids from your channel onto your website will be enough to #1 in your case

If you don't build links too aggressively i.e. don't use any software generated link building in the first 30-60 days of your SEO endeavors, you can bypass any sort of sandbox. You can and should develop your social media properties that inteact and link to your site. Same goes for business directories and review sites (Yelp, Manta, Super Pages, etc) as well as any local directories you can get into. If your competing sites have any sort of commenting feature, go ahead and drop your link there. These small steps combined with good onPage optimization will get you where you need to be in a non competitive SEO space. It doesn't happen over night. Think in terms of weeks, not days with this sort of approach.

lmxftw said:

onpage seo + socials ... as you are in the videomaking business adding your link to your YT channel and sharing some vids from your channel onto your website will be enough to #1 in your case

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+1 for that. Get as many properties that are not your main site in the SERPS as you can. They all link back to you. Think Fanpage, YouTube Vids, Yelp Reviews, whatever. These properties you can aggresively backlink, and they will not only pass link juice to your main site, they'll bring traffic. You can even spread out your campaign to optimize these properties for keywords your main site is not 100% optimized for, thus spreading an even bigger net of keywords all your properties will be ranking for and caturing traffic for in the SERPs.

Thanks to all of you for your replies. What I want to do in the very initial times is doing on-page seo, and slowly publicing hand-written and optimized articles on high pagerank sites, maybe opening a blog or such. Working in the music-videomaking field I can make various articles on techniques and knowledge about that. I'll put my backlinks in there, but the schedule will be very slow in the early time, and I'll avoid link pyramids and that stuff in the very beginning.
Because I am a musician, I've already got a facebook page for my band and a youtube channel. On my channel, I've already got 12 videos, and I make about 2-3 videos per month. I've been thinking of putting a backlink to my site in everyone. The majority of these videos doesn't get that many views (15k on average), but they have very good rating and they are almost all ranked in the first or second position in the youtube search engine for my keywords. Also, there are some exceptions, because some videos were twitted by some very big international artists, so they got a lot of views. Even 300-400k in some cases. I think they will be good clean backlinks.
I've also been preparing some link baiting strategies on facebook and giveaway promotions, so I think I'll get a good amount of social signals from the very beginning.
Thanks again for your kind replies, I was only doubtful about the old-new domain stuff.
Also, I forgot to mention that my activity is local, so I can easily rank in google places at the first position just by registering my business, adding a lot of informations, adding some reviews and making a little of seo for that page. There are, in fact, some decent local searches for my keywords followed by the name of my city. In that case the google places results shows up right under the announces, so it will be fairly easy to rank first there, considering that in my competitor's google plus page the only informations shown are the address of the business. 0 reviews, no pictures and not even text.

don't go for articles just yet... i would rather keep them for when the going gets tough

Thanks for the advice, I was thinking to write good piece of content on other sites because I think it's a good way to produce manual content and backlinks, instead of beginning to structure the tiers right after creating the site. For the schedule, I think 2-3 articles in the first month and in the second, and going on like that increasing the rate as the time passes by will be good. What do you think?