Hi @lightestofideas,
Thank you for your comment. If your link has a nofollow attribute it means that crawlers from search engines won't follow or index this link. This means that it will be invisible for search engines but it stays visible for human beings. So even links with nofollow attributes will bring you visitors.
You can use the quality of steemits own SEO by using good keywords in title, subtitle and throughout the text to make your post very visible on google. Even if your post won't have a value above $13, your links will be visible for human eyes and you might get a lot of visitors.