Okay so, should you stop linking your site to random social bookmarking sites? In a sense, yes. If you want to have natural links, they'll usually come from others. If someone runs a blogging site and finds one of your articles relevant to their blog, THEY will link it themselves, and all of their readers will automatically come to your site with the mindset of reading your article. These clicks will be relevant for you. This takes time to happen, backlinks will grow over time as more and more people share links to your page to other people that they think will be interested. This doesn't happen overnight, and you can't expect it to.You just can't write an article today and expect to have thousands of readers tomorrow. If you let the natural process take place, a well-written article will always generate its own traffic, without you having to constantly be advertising it. The whole idea of passive income comes from the fact that you write your articles, and earn income from them over-time without having to go back to it constantly.

If you have Google Analytics, and the Search Engine section of your traffic isn't the biggest part, you are doing something wrong. By far that should be your largest area. Some exceptions may apply to certain aged articles that have been linked from relevant referral sites and constantly get traffic from them. However, for the most part, your traffic should be coming from search engines. Even then, don't expect that to happen quickly, sometimes it can take a year for search engines to properly rank your page, but as I mentioned before, if it's a well-written article, it will be indexed and found.

If you really, really want to create some backlinks yourself, do them at relevant places. If you are a member of any forums, let's say a music forum, and you have an article that is about music, then link it there. People who click it will be interested to read it, and Google will thus rank it higher in terms of relevance. Meanwhile, since your ads will also be relevant, they are more likely to get clicked. If any other sites are relevant to your topic, then feel free to add your link there. If someone else runs the site, try and contact them and see if they will post your link to their page. A good way of going about this is creating affiliates with sites that are similar to yours so that both of you can share your links back and forth between your sites. Youtube is also a good way of gaining traffic. If you can find a relevant youtube video, contact the creater and ask them to add your link in the description, that could work wonders.

Essentially, if you want quality backlinks, it takes time and effort. It's not as easy as going to a random site and spamming your link there. Either wait for your pages to be indexed properly, or seek other sites willing to affiliate or link back to yours.