What if the other guys do "Content + Links" as well(seeing how this has been the general consensus SEO silver bullet for 5+ years now), we all win?
Link building is to on-page optimization what marketing is to product development.
You can conquer worlds with crappy products and brilliant marketing, but the reverse is also true. Doing both with passion = highest chance to win.
Depending on the type of site and how many links you already have, fortunes can be made by clustering your data/pages better, naming your stuff differently, changing your internal linking etc.. .
"And yes, I think _that_ part of the problem is ripe for automation, and I suspect probably _has_ been automated by the very successful people"
You have gotten it backwards. A lot of link building (read: blog spam, paid bloggers, paid articles, link brokers etc..) has become automated, far beyond the level of automation of on-page optimization.
Link building is to on-page optimization what marketing is to product development. You can conquer worlds with crappy products and brilliant marketing, but the reverse is also true. Doing both with passion = highest chance to win.
Depending on the type of site and how many links you already have, fortunes can be made by clustering your data/pages better, naming your stuff differently, changing your internal linking etc.. .
"And yes, I think _that_ part of the problem is ripe for automation, and I suspect probably _has_ been automated by the very successful people" You have gotten it backwards. A lot of link building (read: blog spam, paid bloggers, paid articles, link brokers etc..) has become automated, far beyond the level of automation of on-page optimization.