As already mentioned in one of the posts, you should see your competition, and the number of links they have. Lets say, you decide to promote your article related to Link Building. Maybe you plan to achieve high rankings in SERPs for some of the terms you have used in your article. See the articles/webpages/sites already doing good for those and related Keywords on Search Engines. Then see their back links. I think your aim should be to get as many backlinks as those sites, if not more through link baiting. However, this cannot be true for highly competitive Keywords, as those sites must be authority sites in that field and have gathered those links over the years.