Every list of link building strategies has the same twelve items and none of them tell you what any of it costs. That's the only question that matters, because with a fixed budget the choice isn't between good tactics and bad tactics. It's between one expensive link and eight cheap ones, and nobody will tell you which is right.
Create Free AccountSo here's each tactic with what it actually costs to run, in money and in hours, and where it stops working.
The cash figures are market rates observed across published vendor pricing in mid-2026. The effort figures assume someone competent doing the work, not someone learning it.
Where a tactic costs nothing in cash and a lot in hours, price the hours. At a loaded cost of $40 an hour, six hours of prospecting to land one link is a $240 link, and it should be compared against a $240 purchased placement rather than against zero. Most "free" link building is more expensive than buying, and the people who insist otherwise are not counting their own time.
One more thing before the list. Every tactic here assumes the page you're pointing at deserves to rank. Links amplify a page that belongs in the results. They don't rescue thin content, and money spent on links before the page is fixed is the most expensive mistake in this category.
Cost: $50–1,500 per placement, plus content.
Effort: minutes per placement once you have a source.
Where it fails: on sites with no readers, which is most of the cheap end.
This is what the majority of "link building" actually is, including a large share of what agencies bill as outreach. A publisher has a rate card, you pay it, your article goes up.
It works. It's also the tactic where money disappears fastest, because the qualification step is the entire job and it's the step people skip. Sort a list by domain rating and buy the top of it and you will end up owning links on expired-domain rebuilds with 200 monthly visits.
The check that matters is organic traffic against DR. DR measures a backlink profile. It says nothing about whether anyone reads the site. Then open the blog index: twenty recent posts, all contributed, all from unrelated industries, is a site that sells to everyone and passes far less than its DR suggests.
Google's position on paid links is public and unchanged, and anyone selling you links while telling you there's no risk is lying. What you control is what you can see before you buy. Every listing on the marketplace carries the DR, organic traffic, spam score, niche, high-risk flags, price and turnaround, across 110,000+ publishers.
Verdict: the default for most sites, and the one most worth doing carefully rather than cheaply.
Worth a worked example, because the arithmetic is what people get wrong. A $2,000 month spent as twenty $100 placements on sites averaging 400 monthly visits buys you twenty links nobody will ever click, on domains with a visible pattern. The same $2,000 as four $500 placements on sites with 20,000 monthly visits buys four links, referral traffic, and no pattern. The second one wins almost every time, and it feels like less progress, which is why people choose the first.
Cost: $50–400. No content cost.
Effort: minutes.
Where it fails: when the host page has no standing of its own.
Also sold as niche edits or contextual links. Your link goes into an article the publisher already has, which is why it's cheaper and usually faster than a guest post.
The variable nobody checks is the host page. A link inside an article that ranks for something and gets traffic is worth several times a link inside a three-year-old post that nobody has visited since publication. Ask which URL before you buy, and look at it.
One more variable: how many other outbound commercial links already sit on that page. If your link is the fourth, you're sharing the page's outgoing value with three other buyers and the publisher has told you nothing about it. Ask, or look.
Verdict: the best value in the category when the host page is real. See link insertions.
Cost: $60–1,500 placement, plus $0–200 content.
Effort: low if you're buying, 3–6 hours per placement if you're pitching cold.
Where it fails: on sites that publish forty contributed posts a month.
A new article on someone else's site with your link in it. The oldest tactic in the category and still the workhorse.
Two versions exist and they get confused constantly. Pitching a real publication that rejects most submissions is editorial work with a low hit rate and a high payoff. Buying a slot on a site with a public rate card is procurement. Both are called guest posting. Only one of them justifies an agency retainer.
Bring your own content and you don't pay for writing, which is worth checking with any vendor who bundles the two into one price. A $150 placement plus $80 of writing is a $230 buy, and a bundled number hides which half you're overpaying for.
The other thing to decide before briefing is where the link goes. In-body contextual links are worth several times an author-bio link and cost the same, which is why some publishers quietly move them to the bio. Specify it, then check after publication. Detail at guest posting.
Verdict: works. Know which of the two versions you're doing.
Cost: $250–800.
Effort: minutes to buy, weeks to earn.
Where it fails: in categories nobody writes roundups about.
Getting into a "best project management tools" or "top 10 CRM" article. These do two jobs: they pass a link, and they send people who are already comparing options and close to buying.
For SaaS and ecommerce this is the most underrated buy in the category, and it's routinely ignored because it's more expensive per link than a guest post. Per customer it's frequently cheaper than anything else on this list.
The reason it's ignored is that it looks expensive per link. Priced per customer acquired it's frequently the cheapest thing on this page, because a "best CRM for small teams" article is read by people who have already decided to buy something and are choosing between options. That traffic converts like bottom-of-funnel traffic, and the link comes attached to it.
Two things to check before buying one. Whether the roundup ranks for anything (many don't), and what position you're being sold. Slot three in a list of twelve is a different product from slot nine, and most vendors won't volunteer which you're getting.
Verdict: underused. If you sell something people compare, start here.
Cost: $3,000–20,000 per campaign. Per-link cost is unknowable in advance.
Effort: high. Weeks of production, then pitching with a low hit rate.
Where it fails: when the story isn't a story.
You produce something a journalist wants, usually original data or a survey with a result nobody expected, and pitch it to reporters.
When it lands, the links are the best you will ever get, from outlets that don't sell placement at any price. When it doesn't land, you spent $8,000 on a survey nobody covered. Both outcomes are common and no agency can tell you in advance which one you're buying.
The mistake is treating it as a link tactic. It's a PR tactic that produces links, and it should be justified by the coverage on its own terms.
The failure mode worth naming: agencies sell digital PR on the promise of national coverage and deliver placements on trade syndication sites that republish press releases. Those are not the same thing and the reporting rarely distinguishes them. Ask, before the campaign, which outlets have covered the agency's last three campaigns, then check whether those outlets have staff writers.
Verdict: worth it once or twice a year for brands with something real to say. A bad default.
Cost: near zero in cash. $400–1,500 in labour per link acquired.
Effort: high. Hours of prospecting per placement.
Where it fails: on abandoned sites, which is most sites with broken links.
Find a dead page, find the sites linking to it, offer your live equivalent as a replacement.
The pitch is unusually easy to send because you're doing the recipient a favour. The problem is arithmetic. Broken links accumulate on pages nobody maintains, and pages nobody maintains have owners who don't read their email. You'll send eighty emails to get a handful of replies.
At a loaded cost of $40 an hour it's rarely cheaper than buying a comparable placement. It's genuinely worth doing when you have an intern, a slow month, or a niche where nobody sells placement at all.
It also has a quiet second use. The prospecting pass for broken links surfaces every site in your niche that maintains resource content, which is a list worth having regardless of whether the broken-link angle converts.
Verdict: better as an argument for content-led SEO than as a link tactic.
Cost: near zero.
Effort: an hour a month.
Where it fails: if nobody mentions you.
Someone wrote your brand name without linking it. You ask them to link it. Two-second edit on their end.
This is the highest conversion rate of any outreach on this page and it takes an hour a month to run. The ceiling is low because it's bounded by how often you get mentioned, which is why it's the first thing to set up and never the thing to build a strategy on.
Read the sentence around your brand name before you send. Asking for a link inside a negative review is a bad afternoon.
Verdict: free money, small amounts.
Cost: near zero in cash. Labour-heavy.
Effort: medium.
Where it fails: when what you're pitching is a product page.
Curated "useful links about X" pages still exist, mostly in education, government-adjacent and non-profit sectors, and their maintainers do add things.
The condition is that you have an actual resource. A tool, a dataset, a genuinely thorough guide with no gate on it. Pitching a pricing page to a resource list wastes everyone's time.
Verdict: worth doing once, after you've built something worth listing.
Cost: $0–100/month for the platform.
Effort: 30–60 minutes a day, sustained, or it doesn't work.
Where it fails: the moment you delegate it to someone who isn't the expert.
Reporters post what they need. You answer fast with something specific and quotable.
Two things determine whether this works. Speed, because the first three usable answers get used. And whether the person answering actually knows the subject, because journalists can tell within a sentence.
The daily-habit requirement is what kills it. It works brilliantly for founders who do it themselves and produces nothing for agencies who assign it to a junior with a template.
The other thing nobody mentions: a large share of the placements are on sites that republish rather than report, so check what you're actually earning before you build a habit around it. One usable placement a month in a publication your customers read is worth the daily half hour. Twelve placements a month on aggregator sites is not.
Verdict: excellent for one specific person at your company. Not delegable.
Cost: $2,000–15,000.
Effort: high, and mostly front-loaded.
Where it fails: when the finding isn't surprising.
Survey your customers, analyse your own product data, or aggregate something public that nobody has aggregated. Then publish it with a method section.
This is the only tactic on the list that keeps earning links after you stop working on it. A useful statistic gets cited for years, and each citation is a link you didn't ask for.
It fails when the finding confirms what everyone assumed. "78% of marketers say content is important" earns nothing. The bar is a number that changes someone's mind.
The cheapest version most companies overlook: you already have data. Aggregate anonymised patterns from your own product, your own pricing, your own support tickets. Nobody else has that dataset, which is the entire point, and it costs an analyst's week rather than a survey budget.
Publish the method alongside the finding. Journalists check, and a study with no stated sample size gets skipped by exactly the people you wanted.
Verdict: the highest-return tactic here, and the one most companies talk about and never ship.
Cost: $5,000–50,000 to build. Ongoing maintenance forever.
Effort: very high.
Where it fails: when the tool duplicates something free and better.
A calculator, a checker, a generator. People link to tools because linking to a tool is useful.
The economics only work if the tool is genuinely the best free version of itself, and if you can afford to keep it running for years. A half-maintained tool that breaks in month eight is a liability with a maintenance bill.
Verdict: a real strategy for a company with engineers to spare. Not a marketing tactic.
Cost: zero.
Effort: a day, once, then quarterly.
Where it fails: it doesn't. People just don't do it.
Not link building, and it belongs on this list anyway, because most sites are leaving more on the table internally than their next three external placements will deliver.
Find the pages with the most external links pointing at them. Link from those to the commercial pages that need help, with anchors that make sense. It costs nothing, it's entirely within your control, and it takes an afternoon.
Do this before you spend a dollar on anything else on this page.
The right tactic depends less on your industry than on what your backlink profile already looks like.
A domain under a year old with almost no profile needs breadth first. Relevant, unremarkable links from real sites, spread over months. Three expensive placements in week one on a domain with nothing else looks exactly like what it is. Internal links, unlinked mentions and modestly priced relevant placements, in that order.
A site with a few hundred referring domains and pages stuck at 8–15 needs concentration, not volume. Pick the three URLs that make money and buy properly good placements for them. This is the stage where most budgets get wasted on breadth that was already sufficient.
A site already ranking well that wants to stay there needs the tactics nobody can buy. Original data, digital PR, and the occasional listicle placement to defend commercial terms. At this stage purchased placements are maintenance, and the growth comes from things competitors can't order.
An ecommerce site with thousands of product pages should stop thinking about product-page links entirely and build to category pages and guides, then handle distribution internally. This is the single most common structural mistake in the category.
Everything above is guesswork without these, and almost nobody keeps them.
Cost per placement, per tactic. Cash plus hours at a loaded rate. After two quarters you'll know which of the twelve tactics above actually works in your niche, and it won't be the one you expected.
Twelve-month survival rate, per supplier. Take the links built a year ago and open them. The percentage still live and still followed is the number that tells you which supplier is genuinely cheap. A $60 link with a 50% survival rate costs $120. A $250 link that stays costs $250. The industry does not track this, which is why the cheap end of the market survives.
Ask any vendor for their survival rate before you buy. The answer, or the absence of one, tells you most of what you need.
Internal links. Number 12 above. Free, immediate, entirely within your control, and skipped by nearly everyone because it doesn't feel like acquisition. If you have never done a proper internal linking pass, do that before reading the rest of this page again.
Checking whether the links you already bought are still there. Take everything built twelve to eighteen months ago and open it. Check for the link's presence and its rel attribute, because a nofollow added quietly at some later date is far more common than outright removal and produces no signal at all. The percentage still live and still followed is the only figure that tells you what your links actually cost.
Neither of these takes money. Both get skipped because neither produces a number you can put in a status update, which is a poor reason to skip anything.
Directory submissions. Excluding a small number of genuine industry directories that people actually use, this stopped passing value years ago and now mostly signals what kind of buyer you are.
Comment links. Nofollowed everywhere that matters, ignored where they aren't.
Web 2.0 properties. Free-host blog networks. Pattern-matched and discounted, and the pattern is trivially detectable.
Reciprocal link exchanges at scale. The occasional genuine partner link is fine. Organised A-links-to-B-links-to-C schemes are exactly what Google's guidance describes, and the footprint is obvious from the outside.
The most common budget and the one every guide avoids, because the honest plan is unglamorous.
Spend nothing in month one. Do the internal linking pass, set up unlinked-mention alerts, and fix whichever target page fails the "does this deserve to rank" test. All of that is free and all of it changes the return on everything after it.
From month two, buy two placements a month at $300 to $500 on sites with real readership in your niche. Two. Not eight at $125, which is what a vendor will offer you and which buys links nobody reads on domains with an obvious pattern.
Put the remaining budget into one thing per quarter that isn't a placement: a listicle slot in a roundup that actually ranks, or the time to write something with a number in it that other people will cite.
At the end of a year that's twenty-two purchased placements you chose deliberately, four roundup or data plays, and a full internal linking structure. It beats a hundred and twenty cheap links and it costs the same.
Start with internal links, because it's free and immediate.
Then decide whether your constraint is money or time. If it's time, buy placements and do the qualification properly, because bad qualification is where bought links stop being worth buying. If it's money, run unlinked mentions and HARO, and accept that both are bounded by things you don't control.
Then, once a year, do one thing on the expensive end. Original data if you have a dataset. Digital PR if you have a story. These are the tactics that produce links you couldn't have bought, and every site that's genuinely hard to compete with has a few of them.
Two numbers to keep. What each placement cost, and what percentage of your links are still live twelve months later. The second one is the number that tells you which supplier is actually cheap, and almost nobody tracks it.
Cost bands per tactic and what drives them are on link building pricing. Product detail is on link building services.
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