Planet13 - 5:38 pm on Mar 30, 2011 (gmt 0)

Rather than think about "link building" I'd reframe the idea and think of building awareness for content, market engagement, that sort of thing.

I would just kindly like to suggest that it is a Chicken or The Egg problem for many of us small fish.

Because we have little to no marketing budget, we were using SEO to build awareness, which in turn we hoped would lead to more inbound links, which would in turn help our rankings, which would lead to increased awareness, which would lead to more inbound links, etc...

So I would say that the way things are, you either are going to have to spend lots more in generating a buzz around your site to get better "natural" rankings, or you are going to have to be very, very creative.