Question, why are people so facinated by getting links? Links don't guarantee money, sales or the right visitors, and all the untargeted link swapping going on, the traffic is unqualified and mostly useless.

I think it's bragging myself, like the amount of links means something, it doesn't. Links are not cash and say I have 50k of links, that's not 50k cash in my pocket is it, so it's nothing.

These methods all webmasters seem to use will fail as whatever is signed up to or used eg: blogs, general directories, classified ad sites etc, is used by general untargeted traffic, which is the wrong traffic and NOT interested buyers, making sales difficult to impossible. I read this and can't believe people get involved in it:


General Mass Directry submission

Will only work if the directories is niche related. General directories are pointless for traffic conversion, as they won't deliver enough to make anyone rich. Using them for backlinks resulting in bragging is a waste of time - bragging is not money is it. You can't spend bragging......

Aritcle submission

Another overused and totally pointless activity. It's spam, pure and simple. Can't spend articles and nobody reads them except for the clueless, and they don't have any money anyway.


Forums

Okay, I'll cut a little slack on these, but only if the forum is targeted 100%, otherwise it's useless traffic.



Social bookmarks

Could be used for general awareness, but otherwise houses and attracts too general an audience, so conversion to sales will be less than if a fully targeted methods is used. Uncertain traffic delivery.


RSS Submission

This will have the same effect as being spidered normally, so not a new technique or anything. I have RSS on my blog - it's no big deal, so why present it as cutting edge.


Many sites are paid (to stop the spam), and it's real tough to get links now. 3 years ago, it was easy - not now as it's all changed, and hopefully for the better. My guess is site owners are slowly learning what they once gave for free, they can ask for a fair bit of cash.

Now my post IS real valuable information!