If you're just beginning to learn SEO, I strongly suggest you to focus on keyword research and content marketing first. I am saying this because excessive link building can be harmful to your blog/site and if that happens, it's going to be major setback to your IM career. On the other hand if you spend enough time to dig out good keywords, and come up with great content ideas, you will have some traffic and money trickling in and your confidence will grow enough to venture into more active SEO activities.
I was just assuming that you're a beginner, my apologies if you're experienced in all this.
Answering your question, tiered link building is a safe approach as long as the tier1 links are super clean. But yes, Google may move up the tiers at some point, can't say anything about that.