Usually, we prefer following few most opted techniques rather than searching for new one. Link building is not away from this concept. In link building we make number of efforts for backlinks from directories, forums, blogs, and article directories and never take chance to try lesser known techniques.

It is evident that, if look outside this frame, we can also take advantage of those opportunities that are overlooked by us. And, one of them is "Competitors Analysis" for "potential link partner".

Whenever we start a business, we include competitive analysis in our marketing plan. The goal behind this is to understand competitor’s strategy, their target audience, and most importantly the USP of their services. This helps us to design our marketing plan. Apart from this, we can also use our competitors for developing links.

This process is quite easy…. Just Google the primary keywords and have a look on websites coming up in the search engine ranking results. Choose first few websites and analyze their sources of backlinks. You can easily track the backlinks of your competitor’s website using backlink checker tools. Make a database of all those resources and try to acquire links from there as if your competitor can get link from there so you are. This will help you to overcome with the problem of hectic digging process of quality resources.

We can sort these link resources according to our website need and budget.

Free Resources- Mostly directories, article sites and forums come under free resources of links. However, As Google gives very less weight to directory submission, it’s better to go for forum participation and article submission for quality links.

Paid Resources- Paid resources include blog reviews, website reviews posting, buying links, etc. But we can use this, only if we have some budget to invest on promotional activities.

Exchange Resources- These are the sources where we can swap links. But we need to watch these links periodically, as they can be removed now and then (depends on our relationship with webmasters).

Target free resources first and try to get as much as we can. Getting links through exchange resources is a good choice as well. However, we must have something to give them in return. Most of the people exchange links and they make separate page for exchanged links. This is not a good practice as backlinks does not look natural.

The third option that left is Paid Resources. As you are paying money, it would be good for you to do proper research and analyze the response before paid.

Overall, predefined techniques are not the only way of link building. If we use our intelligent mind, we can find more opportunities in the way.