Four Link Building Strategies That Work for Blogs

Executive overview

New blogs cannot rely on natural backlinks — those only accumulate once you already have an audience, creating a vicious cycle. To break in, you must manually build links from day one using a small set of proven tactics. This lesson covers four strategies, with the first two — comments and competitor replication — unpacked in detail. Guest blogging and outreach follow in subsequent lessons.

The core insight: leaving genuinely valuable comments in online communities is the lowest-barrier way to start building links, grow an audience, and trigger a chain reaction of earned links over time.

The vicious cycle of SEO

• Pages that rank high attract natural backlinks automatically.
• New blogs have no audience yet, so natural links rarely arrive.
• Without links, ranking is unlikely; without ranking, discovery is slow.
• The only exit: manually build links until momentum kicks in.

Strategy 1 — leaving comments

• "Comments" means more than blog posts: Reddit, Quora, niche forums, Q&A sites, YouTube.
• Value-first approach is non-negotiable — communities ban pure self-promoters fast.
• On Reddit, only a minority of comments need to contain links; consistent helpfulness earns that right.
• On Quora, 100+ detailed answers with embedded links can still drive thousands of monthly referral visits years later.
• Nofollow links dominate in comments — they pass no direct SEO value, but the side benefits are real.
• Side benefits: referral traffic, audience growth, relationship-building with influential bloggers.
• Ryan Stewart example: one smart blog comment led to a tweet from the blog owner, an expert roundup invitation, and a dofollow link — from a single nofollow comment.

Strategy 2 — replicating competitors' backlinks

• Identify pages that already link to competing blog articles in your niche.
• Use tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer to pull a competitor's backlink profile.
• Prioritise sources that link to multiple competitors — higher likelihood they'll link to you too.
• Reach out with a relevant, personalised pitch tied to your own content.

Strategy 3 — guest blogging (overview)

• Writing articles for other blogs in your niche earns contextual dofollow links.
• Choose blogs with a real audience — traffic matters more than domain rating alone.
• Pitch topics that align with the host blog's existing content gaps.
• Hacks for efficiency: repurpose strong-performing content angles, batch pitches to multiple blogs simultaneously.

Strategy 4 — outreach (teaser)

• Covered in full in the next lesson of the course.
• Involves proactively contacting site owners to request or earn links.
• Works best when you already have linkable assets (data, tools, original research).

Key principles across all four strategies

• Quality over quantity: one strong community comment beats ten spammy ones.
• Build relationships first; links follow as a byproduct.
• Nofollow links still grow your audience, and a bigger audience generates natural dofollow links later.
• Start manual; graduate to natural as your blog scales.