Link building can be a challenge, there are plenty of expensive services around (and cheap ones for that matter) but sometimes you can get just as good results by doing it yourself or inhouse.
I have been building websites, creating great content and working on link building for nearly twenty years now - OMG! What I have learnt in that time is that to build up a good link profile you need to work hard and work regularly.
What Google seems to like best, are good quality links from reputable sites, ones which are not spammy themselves and in particular ones which are on topic, ie about your niche or closely related to it. They are particularly good these days at spotting automated / low quality link building so you need to think quality at each and every stage, and expect that in the future the "quality bar" will be raised even higher.
Here is one of the approaches I use each and every week to build links.
First off I use ahrefs.com, which is pronounced as "a h refs" it is a great site with an easy to use interface and one has a huge database of billions of of links which it actively crawls and shares with you.
So here is my routine.
Step 1
I select a phrase for example "Bermuda Trip" that matches the site I am working on in this instance Bermudian Life. I then select a date and Domain Authority range, it needs to be recent, and the auhority level not too low - as weak sites don't push the needle with rankings, but not too high either, as the top publishing sites such as the BBC and the Wall Street Journal all have their own journalists and existing network of contributing authors.
A hrefs content explorer
I then start working through the posts indentified, if they allow comments and there are only a few already then I comment, you can't expect good success rates here, and often the links achieved in this way are nofollow. However in my experience, links bring traffic and even nofollow links seem to count or contribute to your sites trust score. I work on the basis that if I have opened a page to checked it out, then I may as well contribute via a comment as otherwise my time on that page has been a waste. I only comment if there are limited numbers of existing comments and those are on topic and natural.
example blog found via the content explorer
Example link
The process works, see the example link created below.
Example comment link
Next I look for a contact or otherwise save the domain on a spreadsheet then use software to find the domain owner.
Step 2)
I then send a mail asking if the site would like to use one of my unique and high quality articles written about just the sort of topic covered on the page I just visited.
If the answer is yes then I have link and often a dofollow one.
The approach is simple to follow, fun if you like the topic you work with, and seems to work well.
It is a numbers game, but I find I can build good quality links this way and on a daily basis.
Watch the following video for more help and guidance.