Is buying links good for your site?

The most bothering thing when launching a new website is getting enough links in order to get ranked by search engines. Building them naturally takes a lot of time and patience is a rare virtue nowadays. There is always the alternative of buying links, but this can be expensive and it is not guaranteed that you’ll not end in a sandbox out there, waiting for several months to finally enjoy the page rank you acquired by buying those links. Jonathan Leger wrote a very useful and detailed review of the pros and cons of buying links, so in case you consider this option, you might want to take a look at his post, as there are some good learnings in it. Here you are a quote from Jonathan’s post, maybe the most important fact to consider when deciding to go shopping for some links:
With some of the link buying services you get to pick and choose what sites your links appear on, and which pages they appear on. Personally I would recommend not using a service that does NOT let you do this.”
If you go for naturally building links pointing to your blog, there are some tips for speeding up the process a little bit:

1. Submit to blog carnivals as frequently as you can. There are a lot of blog carnivals ongoing on weekly basis, so you have a broad choice. The easiest way to do it is to use a submission service like Blogcarnival.
2. Use trackbacks. Trackbacks are a way to comment on a post from remote distance or to continue a discussion in another blog. Try to find well ranked blogs with topics similar to yours, then refer them in your posts. On the original blog, at the comments of the post you referred, your post will be automatically mentioned, for other people to know that you valued and used the info you found there. Trackbacks are easy to send, after you got the practice.
3. Comment on other blogs you read. Try to keep your comments to the point, make sure they contain some useful piece of info or feedback. Some blogs allow you to include your web address in the signature.
4. Submit and share your posts in social networking sites, making sure that you tag them with the most suitable keywords, so interested readers can find them.
   Find or build a community around your blog’s topic. There are a lot of groups and communities linked together by common interests, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to find a match. Some of them may have quality sites about that topic, so link exchange would be great for all of you.

Either way, don’t forget that it takes time to build an audience for your site, it takes a lot of effort from your side to make them come back to you, to make them subscribe to your feeds or newsletters, briefly, to make the loyal. This is something you cannot buy and once you got it, you have to work even harder to keep it.