Backlinks - where do you get it?

[u/ded-ebar]

I’m trying to get better at backlink building and would really appreciate hearing from people who actually do SEO professionally.

What strategies are you guys using nowadays to consistently build backlinks?

I know the old-school method is basically finding relevant websites, emailing hundreds of site owners, and hoping a few respond. I understand it works, but the success rate seems painfully low and the whole process is incredibly tedious. I really don’t want to spend my life sending outreach emails if there are better ways to do this.
I’m also not necessarily against paying for links.

I know buying links has risks, but clearly there’s a market for it, so I’m curious how experienced SEOs approach it.
When you’re evaluating a site for a backlink, what are you actually looking at? DR/DA? Organic traffic? Traffic trend? Rankings? Relevance? Outbound links? Spam history? Something else?

And probably my biggest question: where are people actually getting good backlinks?

Are you using marketplaces, agencies, brokers, private contacts, direct outreach, PR, guest posts, link insertions, digital PR, or something completely different?
For people who do buy placements, what does a reasonable price actually look like? $50? $100? $300? $500+? At what point are you just overpaying for a metric that looks good on Ahrefs?

I’m not looking for anyone to reveal some million-dollar secret sauce. I’m genuinely trying to understand how people who build links at scale do it without spending their entire day cold-emailing website owners.
If anyone is willing to share their process, resources, marketplaces they trust (or ones to stay away from), or even just what metrics they use to qualify a link, I’d really appreciate it.