Never take the reader for granted. Only if he likes the contents that you have provided on the page, then alone is he going to follow the links which you provide.

If the content is unable to generate interest, and be able to contribute insights & information, the links which were placed for him to follow may just go wasted.

We would rather do well to pay attention to these factors while publishing blogs:

• Quality Content: This is very important and without which all our other efforts would be baseless. There are many other ways of link building as well, but writing quality content is the cheapest and probably the safest way of building in-bound links in a natural and organic way. Slow, but steady is a sure way to winning any race.
• Notifying Other Bloggers on Our Posts: Simply letting the other relevant blog writers know about our posts is healthy. If they respond, like, what you have to say on the subject, good, this might even be helpful in link building. Never get offended if they do not show interest, or lack time. Any positive gesture from their side will help build your page rankings on the search engines.
• Directories: There are loads of directories on the net, and many of which offer free submissions. Begin with a check on the list of blog directories, and submit links to your key pages, with the appropriate keywords in the links. This is a good way of generating inbound links and a very useful strategy. Some directories like www.dmoz.com are valuable and highly respected by Google as well.
• Interlinking Blogs: Networking between sites is a great advantage since they are linked with one another. Bloggers are increasingly joining such blog networks to enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and writers working together. Doing this will give you complete control over how your sites are linked to multiple domains.
• Buying Links: Many professional Web masters are having budgets for purchasing links from other relevant, well ranked and reputed sites in order to improving upon rankings. However, think better, before you go for this because Google is cracking down on these practices. They can’t get them all, but some will fall, and get penalized.
• Swap Links: Many bloggers go in for this type of arrangements where I link your site, and you link mine. If this happens in a natural growth, so fine. But caution for the strategic and formal arrangements of swapping links is that the search engines have developed methods for tracking such strategies, and if found, are devaluating these links.

There also are other methods people try, like triangulated interlinking. Where A links to C in exchange for D linking to B. Making overtime use of owning multiple sites. B &C sites have the same owner, and a similar case with the A & D sites. You’ll find a variety of systems that profess to take care of such arrangements around you. But beware, it wont be long before Google will catch up on this too.

The safest and the best policy is to link the site to your blog if you feel your readers would benefit from. If this gets reciprocated, fine. Otherwise, you lose nothing that you have.