Do a search for "basketball blogs" and check out all of the ones you find. In particular, you are looking for sites that link to other sites and what they link to. Then, create that type of content and ask for a link.

Also, find out what your high ranking competitors are doing (sites ranking for the keyword phrases you are going after). Analyze their backlinks and see if you can get the same.

You should get a quality creative outreach link builder. Unlike sites we work with most of the time that site should be getting ton loads of incoming links easily.

Very nice website zgall1!

Well you have two opportunities here:

1) contact basketball blogs and ask if they are willing to let you guest post. Add 1 or 2 links, where make sense, to some of the pages you want to rank in these posts.

2) Make a topical research of the basketball posts that are getting most traction online (you can use buzzsumo). Write some great content about that, later reach out to bloggers to be included in their roundup, in their posts, or, again, ask to write a guest post on the same topic.

This is the most practical advice I could give you, taking into consideration that you will be doing the work on your own!

The advice you've got so far it's good..

I'd add just to focus on the high authority sites at first if you want to rank well and fast in Google..also try to build some backlinks on quora, yahoo answers

Not to be Debbie Downer, does OP have a right to use all those NBA and shoe images?

Are those all public domain images?

My point is, taking the time to build up a site like that might bite you in the ass when you start drawing attention (outreach, SEO, etc...).

I don't see a blog on your site that will be a good place to start.

If you will write content, promote it on social media and follow the players you can get some traction.

Like most said you need links from high DA sites.

Start by
Writing content for your blog and promoting
Guest post
Write answers on forums

This all takes time.

It's a good point.
Promote site on social media with unique content in the target audience and get backlinks also.

I recommend making a blogs or article about whats happening on the league then share it on social media to have audience and get a better chance to be seen by other people that has interest on shoes and etc.

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I suggest you to find out relevant blog and do blog comments and also you can do a guest blog for relevant sites. it improves your site performance and ranking if you get back links from high authority sites.

I think that the best method is to see what your competitors and other websites from the industry do and do the same

I would try getting on instagram, tumblr creating some photo blogs, your audience will likely be on these two platforms. Curate and create content, follow people who are into basketball start building a fan base.

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I'd build my hoops blog up with:

- helpful content
- links to other hoops blogs
- guest posts on other hoops blogs

Big fan of helping people and not asking for anything versus outreach, because when I assist folks, sans expecting anything, they link to me and buy my stuff and hire me and endorse my eBook and do other cool stuff for me naturally and organically, without me even asking.

This approach helped me land backlinks from many world famous, iconic sites, like Virgin (Richard Branson's blog), Fox News, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and a NY Times best selling author endorsed my eBook too, with me following this service based approach.