This has always been the case....welcome to the internet.

Or "like your content and publish it".

By putting your content in front of people who are already looking for it? (That often comes with a nice, relevant-site backlink as well, though that's less important).

Here's the point: all that backlinks can ever get you, anyway, is some eventual search engine traffic. There are more direct ways of getting better quality traffic (some of which come along with built-in backlinks on relevant sites as a little side-benefit that can gradually grow into a big volume of search engine traffic as a slightly bigger side-benefit).

Example: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5035794

Personally, I tend to advise people not to put much time, effort and energy into trying to attract "organic SERP's" traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (just because of all the high rankings I've got, incidentally, from article syndication to relevant sites) but I'd certainly hate to have to make a living from that traffic! Google rankings, in short, are not really much of a "traffic-generating plan" at all: for many purposes, that traffic's very poor quality and often temporary, too. Just reading this forum regularly will convince anyone of that.

Build a business that doesn't depend on Google.

Build quality links.

If you have a site/page selling insurance to RV owners, there's no way Google can question your link on a campground site/page that you don't own.

Just an example.

Get links from similar/same niche pages where the entire site is focused on the overall niche your own site is targeting. Example, you sell RV insurance, you know a campground site that will give you a link.

Don't buy into the link packages with a thousand different subject types on a single domain, those are crap links waiting to get hammered by Google.

Make sure that your content is unique and in high quality. For sure, Google will find it very valuable for them. As for building links, just build it to relevant sources and gain some social authority by sharing it to your FB friends, Twitter followers, Google Plus circles, etc.