7 Unique Ways to Get Backlinks for a New Website

When you’ve just launched a new website, one of the biggest challenges is getting other sites to link to you. You don’t have existing authority. You don’t have thousands of monthly visitors. And you’re often starting with zero backlinks. You are also competing against thousands of other sites just like you, that are applying the classic link building approaches that everyone knows about by now. This is where we will help you cut through the noise with 7 unique ways to get backlinks for a new website.

But the good news is this: even new websites can attract high-quality backlinks — if you’re willing to think creatively and go beyond the typical guest post or directory submission.

Previously, we have covered both the fastest ways to get backlinks for a new website and a guide on the easiest link building methods for new websites, so if that’s what you’re after, go give them a read! In this post, we’ll cover unique and often underutilized strategies for getting backlinks, especially when your site is still in its early stages. These aren’t just theoretical ideas — they’re proven tactics that can earn you real, valuable links. And we promise those strategies are truly unique and not the same set of strategies everyone and their grandma knows about!

Alternatively, we specialise in link building for new and small websites and are more than happy to secure the exact links you need from genuine sites. Check out our link building services for new sites page to get started!

Common Challenges Around Building Links as a New Website

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when starting link building from scratch. Many new website owners hit roadblocks early and assume that building backlinks is either too hard, too slow, or only for established brands. Here are some of the most common challenges — and how to navigate them:

1. Low Domain Authority Means Low Trust at First:

• Most link opportunities are built on trust. When your site is brand new, others might be hesitant to link to you because you have no history.
• How to overcome it: Focus on relationship-building and low-barrier link opportunities like community engagement, niche interviews, and link exchanges with peers in your space.

2. Your Content Isn’t Link-Worthy Yet:

• If your current content doesn’t offer anything new, different, or useful, it’s going to be hard to justify why someone should link to it.
• Solution: Invest time in making your most important pages unique — whether that’s through custom visuals, data, or personal insight.

3. Outreach Emails Get Ignored:

• Cold outreach has a low success rate, especially if your email reads like a template or doesn’t provide value up front.
• Tip: Personalize every pitch. Mention a specific article, compliment their work, and explain exactly how your link improves their page.

4. You’re Not Sure Which Tactics Work:

• With so much advice out there, it’s hard to know where to start.
• Focus on: One or two strategies at a time. Track your success. Double down on what works, and ditch what doesn’t.

5. You Don’t Have an Audience (Yet):

• If no one knows who you are, getting backlinks through exposure or virality is unlikely.
• Build credibility: By showing up consistently in forums, communities, or comment sections. Be helpful first — the links will follow.

Remember: every authority site started with zero backlinks. Persistence, creativity, and consistent effort will compound over time.

Without further ado, let’s go over some of the most unique ways to get backlinks for a new website. These out of the box link building approaches for new websites will help you stand out in today’s tough link building landscape and help you secure those backlinks you need!

1. Interview Micro-Influencers and Niche Experts

Getting backlinks from big-name websites is tough when you’re just starting out. But what if you flipped the script and provided value to others first?

Interviewing micro-influencers and niche experts is an incredibly effective strategy for new sites. These individuals often have loyal audiences, but they don’t get featured often, which makes them much more likely to respond — and to share or link back to your content.

How it works:

The idea here is to reach out to the micro influencers in your space and offer to interview them via a quick email/ text interview. This way you are far more likely to get a response and you might even get some very insightful content out of this, as the influencers will have time to consider their answers.

• Reach out to 5–10 niche-relevant experts with a few quick, thoughtful questions: Focus on simple questions they can answer in under five minutes. This increases your chances of getting a response.
• Compile the answers into a roundup post or a themed Q&A article: Structure your post so that each contributor gets a short bio, their photo (if possible), and a standout quote.
• Let each expert know when the piece is published and offer visuals or pull quotes they can use: Make it easy for them to share by attaching a custom graphic or suggested tweet.

How to find micro-influencers:

By definition, these micro influencers are unlikely to come up in top of search results or in your social media feed. However, we have found quite a few strategies that work quite well in terms of finding the right influencers to interview.

• Search on social platforms using niche hashtags: For example, search #ProductivityTips or #EcoHomeDesign on Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram to find creators with small but engaged followings.
• Use tools like SparkToro or Followerwonk: These platforms help identify influencers with specific audience interests.
• Look at authors of niche blogs or active commenters on popular industry sites: Many people with smaller blogs are very open to being interviewed if approached respectfully.
• Check podcast guests and webinar speakers in your space: They’re often micro-influencers looking for more visibility.
• Reddit and forums: Look for active, insightful contributors in subreddits or industry-specific communities. These users often run blogs or YouTube channels of their own.

Here are some useful reddit communities to help you find the influencers to collaborate with:

Why it earns links:

• Experts love being featured and often share the post or link back to it from their personal blogs or websites. This is a very creative way to get backlinks for a new website and is very underutilised in the industry, leaving you with plenty of opportunities to kickstart your link building efforts.
• It builds genuine relationships that can lead to future collaborations.

Example: If you’re launching a health blog, you could reach out to fitness coaches and wellness bloggers asking, “What’s one daily habit that transformed your health?” Compile their answers into a compelling article and notify each contributor.

2. Create a Public Resource Library

Instead of publishing isolated blog posts, consider building an evergreen, value-packed resource library. This can be a collection of tools, research, glossaries, templates — anything that’s genuinely useful and organized in a way others will want to link to.

The key here is to really go all in here and create an amazing resource. Don’t be afraid to use your own work, as well as curating individual resources and templates from other websites (rewarding them with a link of course!). In fact, it might not be a bad idea to collaborate with other creators on crafting the perfect resource, likely attracting backlinks from your collaborators from get-go!

Why it works:

• It becomes a shareable reference point for creators and educators in your niche.
• Resource hubs are highly linkable, especially if they’re curated and updated regularly.

Example ideas:

• A “No-Code App Toolkit” that lists and compares tools like Glide, Softr, and Adalo: Include pricing tables, pros/cons, and user reviews.
• A “Beginner’s Guide to Freelance Contracts” with templates, definitions, and case law examples: Make your templates downloadable and give visitors a reason to return or share.

Tips:

• Make it visually appealing and easy to navigate: Use jump links and filtering tools to improve UX.
• Include prewritten embed codes or sharing widgets: Provide users with HTML they can paste into their blogs to promote your resource (with a backlink).
• Include a range of resources: Rich content, incorporating text, tables, bullet points, downloadable components, interactive tools etc. is a fantastic way to boost user experience and make the page genuinely useful.
• Promote, promote and promote: Once your resource hub is ready, promote it to relevant communities that would find it useful, or indeed the micro influencers from the previous point. As your website is new, you’ll probably need to do some legwork to promote your linkable content, as you probably don’t have much traffic yet.

3. Offer Custom Visual Assets

Visuals are one of the most underutilized link-building tools — especially in text-heavy niches. Bloggers, educators, and journalists are always looking for clean, well-designed images to include in their content. Well crafted visual aids are incredibly shareable and often get quoted and shared by bloggers, influencers and social media users alike. We found that just a single, detailed and well crafted Infographic secures on average 5 backlinks for our customers within 3 months.

What to offer:

• Custom infographics: Convert your blog posts into visually engaging summaries.
• Illustrated process diagrams: Help simplify complex workflows in your niche.
• Charts or tables from research: Repurpose survey data or analytics into visuals.
• Styled quote graphics for thought leaders in your niche: Encourage resharing by tagging the quoted expert when posting on socials.

How to promote them:

• Add a line of attribution that says, “Free to use with a link to [your site]”: Keep the branding light, but visible.
• Submit to infographic directories or image libraries: Examples include Visual.ly or Pinterest boards.
• Reach out to bloggers with a relevant pitch: Reference a specific post where your graphic fits.

Example: Create a visual titled “7 Common On-Page SEO Mistakes” and offer it free to marketing bloggers with a one-line attribution link back to your post.

4. Sponsor a Small Event

Sponsoring a local meetup, webinar, virtual summit, or niche community event can earn you backlinks from event pages, partner sites, and even press coverage — all while building goodwill. By sticking to small, local events this can be a very good, unique way to build backlinks for a new website with a low barrier to entry.

Why it works:

• Events typically feature sponsors with logo placements and backlinks.
• Local or niche sponsorships are often affordable and highly relevant.
• It positions your brand as credible and involved in the community.

How to do it:

• Look for opportunities in meetup groups, niche Slack channels, or Eventbrite listings.
• Offer a small donation, giveaway prize, or even just to promote the event.
• Ensure the event page lists sponsors and links back to your site — and ask for that if it’s not standard.

Example: A personal finance blogger sponsors a local entrepreneurship group’s monthly workshop and gets a link from their website, their Eventbrite listing, and a mention in the newsletter.

Bonus Tip: Follow up after the event to ask for a recap post or recording page to include your backlink again.

5. Pitch Yourself to Podcasts (Even Small Ones)

Podcast hosts are always looking for fresh voices — and many niche podcasts are surprisingly open to new guests, especially if you can bring an interesting story or actionable insights.

Once again, as a new website, it can help to focus on the smaller podcasts, as they are often looking for guests and exposure. Just like the previously discussed micro influencers, they also tend to have very loyal audiences that they’re willing to share with you. Therefore benefits of this approach can go far beyond just link building for your new site.

How to craft your pitch:

• Keep it short, relevant, and personal: Mention a recent episode or insight you appreciated.
• Offer a topic or angle that fits their show’s audience: Tailor your pitch to their niche — not just your expertise.
• Include a few quick takeaways or ideas you’d share: This gives the host confidence that you’ll bring real value to the episode.

Why this earns links:

• Podcast episodes often include show notes with links to guest websites.
• Hosts may mention or link to your content during the episode.

Example: Pitch a podcast about remote work with your story of launching a productivity blog during the pandemic, and the exact strategy you used to get your first 100 visitors.

Participating as a guest in podcasts is one of the most effective unique ways to get backlinks for a new website, purely due to how underutilised this link building strategy is. This is also a fantastic way to collaborate with other new, or small participants in your niche.

6. Host a Simple Challenge or Contest

Contests and challenges encourage participation, sharing, and — most importantly — linking. People love showing off their entries, and bloggers love talking about things they’ve accomplished.

This very out of the box link building strategy for new websites can work really well if you come up with a creative contest idea. Our advice here is to look for ways to earn coverage about this contest from other websites, but bear in mind the contest is ultimately designed for the participants, so ensure you shower the winners with praise and celebrate them accordingly!

How to structure it:

• Keep the barrier to entry low (no signup required): Let people participate by posting on social or linking from their blog.
• Offer a public page to track participation or submissions: Feature top entries or link back to participants.
• Incentivize participants to share with badges or links: Offer HTML snippets they can embed on their site.

Example: Host a “1-Week Writing Sprint” for bloggers, where they must publish one post a day. Offer a digital badge with an embedded backlink for anyone who completes it.

Why it works:

• Participants often link back to the contest page.
• Other sites may feature the contest if it gains traction.

7. Publish Original Data from a Small Survey

You don’t need a massive budget or email list to publish original research. Even a 50-100 person survey can produce compelling, shareable insights — especially if it addresses an under-covered question.

The key here is to pose a good question, that is not already answered with a much bigger case study by the competitors in your niche. You don’t need to run some huge study exploring a broad question. Instead, you can narrow your study down to a very specific question, that hasn’t been answered. This will make things far easier when it comes to the next step, which is promoting your study.

How to do it:

• Use tools like Google Forms or Typeform: Keep your survey short — 5–7 focused questions that get to the heart of a trend or problem.
• Share the survey in niche Facebook groups, Slack communities, or on Reddit: Provide context about why you’re running the survey and what you’ll do with the results.
• Compile the results and visualize them with graphs and charts: Use Canva, Flourish, or Google Charts to create clear, compelling visuals that other content creators can embed.

How to promote your survey and attract backlinks:

• Publish a well-designed blog post summarizing your findings: Make the headline benefit-driven (e.g., “What 87 Freelancers Told Us About Pricing in 2025”).
• Include tweetable stats and embeddable charts: Offer snippets or code so others can reuse your data with a credit link.
• Reach out to bloggers, journalists, and niche publications: Offer the insights as a reference for their next article or roundup.
• Submit to content roundups and data repositories: Sites like Databox, GrowthHackers, and curated newsletters often link to original research.
• Repurpose into guest posts: Use the data to write opinion pieces or case studies for other websites in your niche, earning backlinks in your author bio.

Pro Tip: Create multiple data graphics (e.g., “Top 3 Takeaways” or “Most Surprising Result”) to give other sites more visual options to link to.

Why it earns links:

• Journalists and bloggers love referencing stats.
• Data-driven posts are frequently cited in roundups and educational content.
• Over time, these studies will position you as an expert within your niche, leading to further link building opportunities.

Example: Create a post titled “How 73 Bloggers Monetize Their Sites in 2025” and break down the responses by income source, traffic tier, and content type.

Final Thoughts

Backlink building for a new website doesn’t have to feel like shouting into the void. By using creative, relationship-driven tactics — and offering real value — you can earn powerful, relevant links even before your domain has any authority.

The key is to give people a reason to link to you. Whether it’s a useful asset, a great story, or a community initiative, people link to things that are helpful, unique, and worth sharing. By employing these 7 unique ways to get backlinks for a new website, you can tap into underutilised strategies that will make you early link building efforts feel less like a grind.

And remember: you don’t need hundreds of backlinks to grow. Just a few high-quality, niche-relevant links can make all the difference early on.