I have a blog with over 450 posts with an average of 1600 words per post.

Each post has custom images and some have videos I've made for the topic that have hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.

I'm monetized with Mediavine, earning around $4500/month.

I've hired developers to create multiple custom tools that have thousands of users a day, for at least 2 years now.

Using Ahrefs, I don't see any backlinks except the blog comments and pay-for-insert-on-similar-blogs that I've done. My DR is 39 and has been around there for 6 months. Even the best 5,000 word 15-custom-images, 2-custom videos beautiful page with over 80,000 pageviews a month doesn't just "earn" links to it, and its been up for over a year. Maybe its my niche?

I can hire great writers, great artists, great video animators, but I can't find great link builders.

How do I build links? I've hired a few "links building expert"s on Upwork but they are all agencies using PBNs or seem to just buy a gig on Fiverr based on the reports, and I've even tried them...

Niche edits? Guest posting? Paid sponsorships? PBN? Press release?

I realize this may be a bit of a rant, but maybe someone else out there feels the same, or maybe I'm really missing something.

Would love your thoughts!