It's time you stopped scrounging for links from cheap places such as broken directories, spammy blogs, and crappy forums. You will not get anywhere. At least not in the long term. You might get some short term results, a few sales, but in the long term, it will only make you hopeless. So what do you do? How do you stay on top of the game? Change your perspective on SEO - It's the age of link earning, not link building. Here's how you should focus your marketing and link building efforts: Give 80% of your time to creating content. There are plenty of guides online. Google them up. Create a variety of content. Text, images, videos, graphs, infographs, tutorials. Give 10% of your time promoting this content. On social, on other blogs, on forums, through comments. Give the last 10% of your time to planning the next step. (Trust me, a lot of people don't plan at all!) Focus on your readers, try and creating marketing personas because that's much easier than writing for a faceless mass of people. Earning 10 links is equal to building 100 links. Try it out.
Good tip. I like your breakdown of time as well. With the changes in Google it clearly is all about natural links. This means we need to slow it down and realize meaningful, quality links are going to take time to get. There's no way around it.
Great read. Everyone should look at Eric Ward. He's been doing natural link building since the start. He's the only link builder that Matt Cutts endorses. We consulted with him and he advised on building free educational tools that we could put on our and site and deliver to other sites for free. Along with a carefully crafted email and phone script. Yes, cold calling for top quality links works wonders. We got free links on Harvard and other top EDU sites naturally and within topic, not on some student sub page.