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Ideas on link building?
Posted by on May 14, 2026 at 10:04 amI'm trying to get a sense of what the landscape is for links these days. I don't have the budget to buy good quality links; there's no value in buying spammy links.
I'm a writer – so guest posting makes sense. But it doesn't seem that there are many good guest post opportunities – people seem to want to keep content creation in-house and are hesitant to reply to cold emails.
So, I'm interested in thoughts on whether guest posting is a real option – and if so how you've gone about it. I'd also be interested in other strategies that you've found to grow your link profile in 2026.
Thanks!
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1 Reply
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There’s a free method that works well but not for every industry – best for food, travel, real estate, health, anywhere people constantly need visuals.
Not to much work..just pload original photos or niche specific images to Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels with your site in the attribution field. Every time a blogger or journalist pulls your image, that credit is a backlink. In this way you will get free backlinks from DR 90+ sites – no outreach needed
Reverse image search your photos every few weeks – you’ll find sites using them without crediting you. One short email asking for attribution and they almost always add it. They took your content, they know they owe you.
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If you’re a writer you can write actually good articles (willing to put in some work). I would say this is your golden ticket, number one.
1. Reach out to 100 corporate blogs with a pitch.
2. Get at least one person who bites.
3. Write the article.
4. Reach out to 50 other bloggers. Ask if they have any content that they want you to mention inside of your guest post. In exchange they have to give you a link back from their blog to your blog.Some people will respond especially if you reach out to the person who is the marketer or the content manager on the site. What you’ve just done is turned one guest post opportunity into two or three backlinks. You rinse and repeat, scale that up, and you could be sitting on 100 to 200 backlinks over the course of 12 months.
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Guest posting still works, but cold outreach response rates feel way worse than even 2 years ago. The best results I’ve seen lately come from publishing something with actual data or a weird angle first, then using that as the pitch instead of “I can write an article for you.” People ignore generic outreach fast now.
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