Is genuine-quality-content-driven backlink outreach pointless? I've been trying to hire a VA on UpWork to reach out to blogs and websites that cover marketing topics, and see if they are interested in re-posting / linking back to our content (which is also all about marketing, but much more niche, as we talk about how you use comedy and humour to make your marketing land). Everyone I've spoken to so far, though, has told me they don't do manual outreach. As an example: "i don't get links through outreach, I prefer, safest and most genuine methods like, getting it through Social Bookmarks, Press Release, Blogs, Citations. These links are of high quality and they never get penalized. " Is this actually the case? Or am I just looking in the wrong places, for the wrong freelancers? We have content that I genuinely believe the right people could, and should, be interested in - can manual outreach deliver? Or is it all pay-to-play and / or Web 2. 0 these days?