Looking into building your first backlinks? I don't envy you. It's a time consuming and thankless job. In fact, if you don't know what you're doing, this can easily suck up a massive amount of your time and result in a grand total of nothing. I made feeble attempts at building links for years before I ever made my first true link.

I don't want you to struggle with that. So here's my growing list of strategies with which I have found real success. Block off a few hours (or a few days honestly) and try each one of these strategies. Different angles will work better for different niches. Once you find one that works, double down and run that strategy until it rolls over and dies or you find a better one.

1. Keep a running G Sheet of all of your competitors domains. When you get some free time, periodically enter each one into the AHrefs backlink explorer. It's a great free tool. Record the DA for each competitor in your sheet. That way you can order by DA.

But don't stop there. Scan the 100 backlinks that Ahrefs shows you for free. There's a lot of garbage links out there, but you should hunt for links from good domains. it should be pretty easy to tell. You want domains you recognize, or domains that seem like they could be competitors in your niche. Add any new competitors you find to that G Sheet.

Get familiar with these links. As you understand who is linking to who, you will begin to understand how you can work your site into the mix. Paid links become quite obvious. The types of content that get links starts to become recognizable. And you should stumble on some topics where you see a link to content that you could do a much better job with. Adding the topic to your content plan with a note to reach out to that site when you publish.

Now, eventually, you will find something special... Dead sites.

If you find that a site is embedded in the linking structure for your niche, and it no longer exists, you are in luck. You've got 2 techniques to run with now.

First, put the domain into a domain name service to see if it's available. It's a long-shot, but if you can get this site for a steal, you can but it, recreate it's linking profile and use it as a booster for your operations.

But the second technique is always helpful. Put this site into the backlink explorer and see if there's anyone still linking to this dead site. If some links come up, you've got yourself a list of prime backlinking opportunities.

Do you see any content linked that already exists on your site? Go ahead and reach out to the linking site and see if you can help them out by offering your link to replace that broken one. It's not a perfect scheme. But don't be afraid to really hound any communications you can find for the site. You are kinda doing them a favor.

2. Use Wikipedia regularly so that your contributions are tested. Google search site:wikipedia.org ‘your key phrase’ ‘dead link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_with_dead_external_links

"A player must have control of the ball to travel. For instance, a player who bobbles a pass may well take several steps legally—the traveling rule is not in effect until he has secured control of the ball."

The height of the dribble or number of steps taken per dribble is irrelevant.