There is no "right way" for the amount of links. Some people wait for months before they start building, some do manual stuff at the beginning, some spam right away. You might want to run some test campaigns for test sites and gather your own information!
I personally suggest starting with manual links for like a month and then start with 25/day for another month and then start to increase. Make sure to extend your tiered linking as 25 powerfull links per day are more effective and more safe than 500 per day.
It is obvious that when you get hundreds of new backlinks without a
proper reason, it may look unnatural. The links should be built
gradually. Start building links with 5-10 links per week and then slowly
increase this number. The best scenario is to combine your link
building campaign with advertising campaign. In this case you get the
traffic increase from advertising, which explains the reason why you
also start to get new backlinks, referring to your domain.
"Safe" is a myth, it's against G's TOS to do anything to try to manipulate rankings... What do you think building backlinks of any kind (including manually) does?
It manipulates the rankings of course, so don't worry about it. If you get stung, get a new domain and come back bigger and stronger.
Try to reach a level where you have many domains and new ones being built all the time, that way you'll find the secret to beating the big G
Comments
You might want to run some test campaigns for test sites and gather your own information!
I personally suggest starting with manual links for like a month and then start with 25/day for another month and then start to increase. Make sure to extend your tiered linking as 25 powerfull links per day are more effective and more safe than 500 per day.
It is obvious that when you get hundreds of new backlinks without a proper reason, it may look unnatural. The links should be built gradually. Start building links with 5-10 links per week and then slowly increase this number. The best scenario is to combine your link building campaign with advertising campaign. In this case you get the traffic increase from advertising, which explains the reason why you also start to get new backlinks, referring to your domain.
It manipulates the rankings of course, so don't worry about it. If you get stung, get a new domain and come back bigger and stronger.
Try to reach a level where you have many domains and new ones being built all the time, that way you'll find the secret to beating the big G