Most cost effective method of backlinking?

[Darius Balogh]

Hi,

I'm new to the internet marketing world (started last June taking it up seriously). In July, I launched my first serious website and set about the task of back linking once I had enough content on the site to consider it decent enough for public consumption.

First thing I tried was social bookmarking. I made a lot of newbie mistakes like posting boldly to the front page of reddit >.<. The reddit monster didn't like me after that. Other social bookmarking services did me next to no good by only offering do not follow links. In my experience, squidoo, stumbleupon, and digg are the best social bookmarking tools because they offer do follow links.

I later looked into backlinking through forums or article writing. Article writing supposedly takes time, but pays off in the end. Contributing to forums provides ample backlinks, and can also be quite fun.

But as a student, with a job, and very little time, I ask the more experienced on the thread what is the most cost effective means by which to provide a site with high quality backlinks?

[summerfranken]

Post some relevant and unique content to get some valuable and dofollow back links.

[easyrider7]

Article writing is the hard way to get ranked. You go to a huge amount of effort to just get two reasonably low quality backlinks. A better method would be to approach someone with a high PR blog (with lots of traffic) in you niche and then convince them to let you do a guest post - in return for a link or two back to your website. If you provide a high quality article the post could reach PR3-5 over time and make the links very powerful ones.

[Darius Balogh]

Thanks for the response easy rider. Which would you say is more powerful between internal or external backlinking? Which has more overall sway in the search engine?