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In the last 3 years there happened a lot in online publishing. New magazines like lifehack, upworthy, viral nova revolutionized the publishing business. Not only got these website within up to 2 years 5 Million unique+ visitors, they also changed the art of writing in the internet. Viralnova and Upworth through headlines, lifehack through media. Even the monetization changed and Upworthy realized a new trend, that simple ad-showing business will die and ads have to be more sutil (sponsored posts). Even old media like the huffingtonpost started spamming and recurating content, instead of focusing on old-school journalism. Unfortunately there are many sad parts: If I research a topic I only find main stream articles that don't go into deepth anymore. The physics nerd that publishes amazing and analytical content got replaced by the newest gawker article. And sites with (from my point of view) trash content like about.com and webmd.com are still big in business. I saw them dying already 2 years ago but it never happened. The content of this huge websites is basically the same. And their backlinks come mainly from PR and an existing brand. Nobody would like out to an about.com article if it wouldn't be about.com . Newcomers have a tough job: SEO for 2014+ seems to me consisting out of getting covered in one of these big magazines. Do you agree? Will this trend continue? What adjustments did you make for your own business? I started to adapt headlines slightly and hired a designer who just creates illustrations related our articles. I also noticed that you cannot build sites about small niche topics anymore, everything has to go big. More categories, more mainstream. What are your thoughts?

I've started a magazine in Latin America about creative ways of making money, working from home, learning technical skills from home. We are not that spammy like other "make money" magazines, but of course we want to sell information products in the future. So far we are 3 people. I already have years of SEO experience but I built blog networks of expired domains and ranked for specific keywords. In this case I need more Brand backlinks and get Domain Authority. Unfortunately we failed pretty hard so far. What we tried: 1.) We searched for 2 infographic linkbaits that were very successful in the US, redesigned them, used similar content and reached out to around 60 websites. We offered them that we write a guest post made for their website from a professional journalist and embedding our infographic. From the 60 websites and no deal. The graphics costed us around 400$ to create. 2.) We tried to interview people (in the hope that they will link back to us from their website after the interview). Unfortunately from around 120 e-mails only two responded - only one linked back to us. We contacted them through the contact forms of their websites. 3.) We offered money for a blog post. After 2 hours of reaching out, we got 6 backlinks for an average of 40$ per link + time. Is the whole blogging culture only existing in Anglistic countries? It seems to me that people only link out to big brands (who started offline) or they charge money. The websites that rank for terms like "make money" (ganar dinero) have only paid- and spam backlinks. A few exceptions by people who had contacts to journalists of big magazines. What's my strategy?