OK....I have a new website....of course i would love to get authority links from my niche....but those may be few and far between. So I have been building backlinks by getting into directories, and commenting on dofollow blogs. 1) Should I try for all directories that I possibly can or only niche ones? 2) The dofollow blogs may not be related to my site....does this hurt me in the long run or is a backlink a backlink for the most part? Of course i will be doing article submission and forum signitures along with everything else>
It's good to have a diversified link building strategy. You can start submitting to directories and also see if you can actually do guest posting on some blogs. Don't spam the blogs with useless comments Forums are a good way to build backlink as well as for getting traffic. Article submissions are fine, but you have to do a lot of writing for it to be useful.
Commenting on Dofollow blogs not related to your niche is not going to hurt or penalize your rankings in any way. It's just another backlink. But try to find blogs related to your niche, even distantly related blogs can carry some "link juice" for your site.
Your strategy sounds fine to me. You don't need to spend your time submitting to every directory you can find though. There are really only 10 - 20 directories worth submitting to. The others help very little, especially since directories each link to thousands of websites. As for blog commenting, the others are correct in saying that it won't harm you. Just remember that the search engines won't penalize you for something that a competitor could do to you. Instead of penalizing, they may not count some irrelevant links. Just keep working at getting new links on a regular basis and from multiple sources. Don't concentrate too much on any one strategy.
Web directory submission (for me is just a waste of time... (you can still get backlinks from web directory submission, but it gives little results) Blogging and forum postings are the 2 effective ways to link build a website. Blog commenting takes time, but I find it effective IF and ONLY IF comments a done properly.
What was the last time you tried directory submissions? For small competition (less than a million) directory submission is one of the most cost effective method to get the site on first page. I don't recommend blog commenting because people tend to go overboard and start spamming others