I’m doing SEO for a new site in a small niche (password security). No budget at all: no paid tools, no paid links.

The main asset is original studies. So far I’ve done:

about 16 personal pitches to journalists and resource pages, with 1 reply and no links yet

HARO and Qwoted

a few profile links (Indie Hackers etc.)

study graphics on Flickr and Pinterest

I’ve paused outreach. The pool of people covering this topic is small and I don’t want to burn through it.

Next I’m planning stuff that brings links in without emailing everyone:

a bigger data study ranking sites on one thing, the kind reporters like to cite

embeddable charts with attribution

Show HN, GitHub awesome lists, AlternativeTo, Product Hunt

For tools I’m sticking with free ones for now: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, Hunter’s free tier and Google Alerts.

Questions:

Is $0 link building realistic long term, or will I have to pay for something eventually?…