"Link Building Makes My Brain Hurt"

Sometimes I think the SEOs who win out in the end are those with the will, rather than the skill. I have a million things I could be doing for a lot of my sites, but in truth I really can only summon the energy to go "all out" for two or three. And I suspect that those two or three will make me more money than all the rest together, in the long term.

We all get exhausted by the many necessary tasks involved in building sites, from time to time. Especially with link building. Let's be honest: it's often tedious and annoying. It can also seem like a lot of work for low return (although I will argue that link building almost always has a spectacular ROI). This is the topic in this WMW thread, titled Just can't get myself to do link development. One_on_One posts:My brain hurts just thinking about link development...it's such a tedious, boring process. How do you guys do it to drive traffic to your sites?My brain hurts just thinking about his brain hurting. ryan26 has a short reply but I think it's a nugget of wisdom:Dirtiest job in SEO but the most important. Try and think out of the box. Press releases, RSS feeds, PHONE CALLS. Every small step forward is a step in the right direction.Of course you can take the easy way out and just rent links, but experience tells me this won't work well unless you have a decent underlying base of permanent links.There are no freebies in life! Unfortunately that goes for link building as well...