If you only have bare links directly to your site, and none of those pages links to anything else and nothing links to them this does not look natural. Organic links don't grow that way. The are all interlinked, and the juice gets passed through the links to your site anyway. If you link to the articles people will find them and if they are well written people will stay on the page a few minutes. Google notices this and attributes quality to the page. This quality gets passed on in the juice via your backlinks.