For tier one, find the best platforms that you possibly can, and the create a manually appealing, high quality article. An article that people will remember after reading, something really nice. This is what Tier one should consist of! Nothing less. Link tier one to your money site and do not create any links to it.
When you establish your tier 2 -- link tier 2 to tier one only. You can build tons of links to tier 2 -- unless you're going to create and run tier 3.
Keep in mind that this strategy is not 100% safe and can also cause Google penalization, so be as careful as possible...