How to Get Backlinks for a Brand New Website (Even With Zero Authority)

We got backlink ideas today. This was shared on the entrepreneur subreddit. How do you earn back links for a brand new site with almost no authority? Won't they think it's spam? The question is from Mr. Samuel Nison who says, "My partner and I launched a new website about 3 weeks ago. It's an AI tools directory. Right now, our site authority is very low around five, which is expected, but we're trying to think correctly about earning back links." Our plan was to create spike posts first, useful niche content, and later build more in-depth power pages. The idea is to attract organic links over time. But we keep running into what feels like a chicken and egg problem. If we reach out for links now, why would anyone link to a brand new site with almost no authority? From the outside, I imagine it could look spammy even if the content is useful. So, I'm curious how more experienced founders approach this early phase. What signals actually make a new site feel trustworthy enough to earn links? What worked or didn't for you when you were at this stage? Did you actively pursue link building or did you wait until you had some traction? First of all, when you're going out and getting back links, most websites or journalists or whoever you're trying to get back links from, they can't tell that you're a new site unless you make it very clear that you're a new site. If you have a site that looks legitimate, that reads legitimate, looks legitimate, doesn't read like AI content, doesn't look like a claw generated site that you made in 5 minutes, it's not going to look like a new site, and people aren't going to be able to tell. The people who link to you, they're most often not looking at your authority. The top comment on this is the trick is to not lead with, "Hey, link to my site," but instead focus on building genuine relationships first. This is such good advice. Start by commenting thoughtfully on other people's content in your niche. Engaging on social media, maybe even contributing guest posts without asking for links back. Just provide real value and let people discover your site naturally through your profile or signature. I actually just had a thought, a crazy thought. Oh my gosh. Let me Okay, I'll I'll finish reading this. Once you've established yourself as someone who actually knows their stuff and isn't just another link farmer, then you can start more direct outreach, but frame it around the value you're providing rather than what you want from them. All right, getting a VA, a virtual assistant, is so inexpensive. It's really, really wild. And I just had the thought that you could hire a virtual assistant who is kind of like the brand ambassador who just manages it's basically a social media manager managing an ex account or a threads account or a LinkedIn company page and their job is to just comment give actual human comments on different influencers posts in your space. positive comments, not basic like, "Oh, this is cool. I didn't read your posts. I'm just going to say this is cool comments." But actually reading people's posts and giving a thoughtful comment on it. And then you get a relationship. Eventually, people check out your stuff. Or if you are asking for links, it becomes so much easier because these publishers or these people, they know your brand now. They they recognize your brand. And the cost of doing that would be really inexpensive. You could also do it yourself. Just carve out follow a lot of people in your space who could get you good backlinks. Carve out 15 minutes a day to just comment on social media. That's it. 15 minutes a day to comment on social media. And then you can do it yourself, too. Maybe you can't afford a virtual assistant, but 15 minutes a day would be all that it takes. Relationships are so important. Another mistake that people make is when they get links from publications, they don't create a relationship with the journalists who link to them or who wrote about them. And it's a really easy thing to do. It's like after 2 months, you say, "Hey, you wrote about me in this article. Let me know if you're working on anything else in the space. I'd love to to give a quote or help or give feedback in any way. Just be helpful." Always offer to help. That is something that so few people do that the experts that the link building and public relations experts do is they create relationships and they check in with people who can offer them links. And a lot of journalists by the way write from multiple publications. So if you have a relationship with one journalist, you could be getting back links from multiple publications. Next comment. This comment is funny because there's zero punctuation. So I'm going to do my best with it. I get what you mean. First links are hardest and it feels like nobody trusts a new page. What could help is looking at similar web to see where others get their links. You do not need big words or fancy outreach. Just write spike posts and send a short note to people who link to similar sites to say why your spike post is a bit different and you're not pushing spam. I found that if you keep it real and keep sharing helpful stuff, people start to trust you and it takes longer than you want, but it does work. Keep at it and do not worry about the numbers yet. Numbers come later. Basically, publish useful stuff that people want to link to, but you still need to get people to see it in the first place. Having relationships definitely helps. I'll also recommend I always recommend this article. It's on my site. The AI system to find relevant journalists, land coverage, and earn ongoing high authority backlinks. It's a series of chat GPT agent mode prompts. It starts with four local businesses, but you can adapt it to any business. I share how to do that later on in the article. And it's chat GPT agent mode prompts to figure out interesting pitch angles to journalists, then to find the journalists who would want to cover you, and then to write the pitches for the journalists. And lots of people are using this and getting great mentions from publications with this method. But then again, once you get the mentions, once you get covered, check in with the journalists every couple of months. Please create a relationship. Next comment. Build trust first. Real about and contact info, author bios, editorial guidelines, fast pages, clean UX, HTTPS schema, a logical internal link structure, and unique data from your directory that others can site. First of all, before I go on, this one sentence is completely underrated. It is really good with the exception of schema because basically what this person is saying, have a site that looks trustworthy so that people will feel confident linking to it. You're trying to get real backlinks. If you are trying to make yourself a reputable brand, you don't want to link to what looks to be a templated WordPress PBN blog, you don't want to link to that. You want to link to a site that looks real, that actually looks like the person cares about it because you're sending your visitors to another place and almost vouching for that other place by linking to them. So, you're not going to link to something that looks spammy. So, have a site that looks trustworthy so people feel comfortable linking to you. Now, the reason I I said with the exception of schema is because if you're a brand who's evaluating whether to link out to another brand, you're not going to look at their schema. But the about contact info, author bios, give a phone number, have fast pages, clean UX, HTTPS, logical link structure, that is great. This comment continues, "For links, lead with value assets, not asks, a transparent ranking methodology, a live AI tools, stats page, small data sets, or an embeddible widget. Then pitch to niche newsletters, resource pages, harrow or quoted requests, and refresh broken or outdated AI tool lists. Pursue a handful of high fit placements and launch sites like Product Hunt while you publish. Skip mass outreach and aim for 10 to 20 relevant referring domains over chasing domain authority. Also a good comment. I made an episode recently about how to make linkable assets and a prompt that you can use to come up with them, which in this one is also getting people great results is episode 1,037 of this show. How one simple website got 384,000 backlinks, linkable assets explained, and you can learn how to make linkable assets, come up with them and make them in that episode. This commenter mentions help reporter out and quoted. I'll add source of sources is great, too. Source of Sources actually probably has the best publications right now. Featured.com is paid, but because you're paying for featured.com, they will it's the same thing as helper reporter out, which is journalists need expert quotes for the articles that they are writing. If you are accepted as an expert, you get a link. But for featured.com, because it's paid, featured will actually work harder to get you accepted in publications. So, you stay with them. And that's great, too. Something else that I will add is when you are making linkable assets or if you have a SAS, figure out a way to have some sort of share function. You want people to share your website. If you have a share function, people will share your website and you will also get links. You will get referral traffic and you will get links. If you can figure out some weird, quirky, interesting, fun, useful way to work in a share function, it will be so valuable. Try to get people sharing pages within your SAS or within your linkable asset. And the last comment from this is the number one thing is just have something worth linking to. In 2026, you can probably get that one thing right and you'll get links. If you don't, then you probably won't get any. It's very pass or fail. Yeah, I disagree with that. Actually, I I disagree with this last comment because you can totally get links without having something worth linking to. with help a reporter out. If you give a useful comment, they just link to you. They say, "Oh, Edward from this publication or Edward from this company said this and it's a useful comment and then they link to you even if your business isn't useful." Or you can get in directories. You can go on podcasts. We started for this new app that I'm funding. One of the first things that we're doing is going on podcasts. Signed up to a podcastmatcher.com. That is my affiliate URL. But within the first week, my operator, who has never gone on any podcasts, went on either two or three podcasts. In the first week, he's never been on any podcast before. In fact, he's quite shy. He's already been on two podcasts. And after, we share our link along with how we want it to be described, controlling the language around our link. There's tons of ways to get back links even if you are a brand new site with almost no authority like Samuel Niss in the entrepreneur subreddit. Thank you Samuel for this question for putting up this post and giving me content for the day. Thank you to all the commenters. If you want to save years learning how to do search engine optimization that gets customers, users, warm leads calling you up, I have a 13 and 1 half hour SEO course about this at compactkeywords.com. that is specifically targeting people who are searching for what your brand offers. They just don't know that your brand exists. And because these people are so high intent, the keywords are actually less competitive. There's just less people at the bottom of the funnel who know exactly what they want because the search volumes are lower. The competition is lower, which makes the keywords easier to rank for, which means you don't need as many links. So, if you want to learn how to find those keywords, how to structure your site for pages that target these keywords, how to do a site audit, there's a two-hour link building section, and so much more, that is my SEO course, compact keywords.com. Check out the testimonials on the landing page. And if you haven't gotten the course before, you're going to love it. That's everything for episode 1,048 of my daily search engine optimization podcast, The Edward Show. 1,048 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.