It is too easy to look at the rampant copying and dirty tricks used to pull in viewers for ad revenue and think "if you can't beat them, join them" or worse "I might be able to beat them, but joining them seems easier".
Your search ranking is determined by your ability as a writer rather than the quality of your product.
The thing is: who you link to also matters and can harm your website if not done correctly. Linking to a site that is full of scraped content, AdSense and with a poor design is a bad idea, for instance. When you place a link to a site, you become associated with that site.
Regardless of your tactic, you still need to put the work in to build a good looking site with great content or you won't get far. In fact, if your prospective target is willing to link to a shoddy site, I would treat this as very suspect. Chances are the link won't be worth anything.
As an example the easiest way to get paid links is through directory sites (the cheap ones) and you have to be careful there, a lot will not benefit you at all if not to a detriment.
To be honest, just having worthy content is almost cliche. I prefer to think of it as a foundation to build on with a variety of strategies and tactics. For example, you write a great blog post (the foundation) and then go and post it on your twitter, HN and/or reddit (your additional link and traffic building strategies). Without the additional work, it becomes much like a "build it and they will come" mentality and the only time this could actually work is if you were already at the top of your game.
A few of these techniques - link exchanges and buying links - sound like really bad advice, especially given that she is a former SEOmoz employee. She also omits the most straightforward way for startups to get backlinks => create content on your site worth linking to.