Really depends on the niche, some just don’t get natural links often. If you’re in porn, gambling, pharma, insurance or law, you can’t expect many natural links, unless you class affiliation links as natural. Yet these are some of the most expensive and profitable niches around which require huge amounts of links to rank for the biggest keywords.

Also, put yourself in the shoes of the people that are creating these natural links. Say you were given a subject to write on, what’s the first thing you do? You research it on Google and you’re not going to go through 10 pages for that research, you would probably check the top few results. Having natural links is easy once you have the rankings but not so much if you don’t.

There are of course ways where you can push these natural links through skyskraping. vanity, guest blogging, broken links, unlinked mentions, social & PPC but I feel that people who are saying number like an 80% natural link profile are either talking about already established brands, have an incorrect understanding of natural or just plain lying.