Forum Moderators: martinibuster
You can build a web tool for your subject of choice and distribute it free with an imbedded link to your site, so that if anyone places it on their site you have an automatic link.
If you have the capital, I will second the notion that buying links is an excellent way to pick and choose your arena, but the upkeep and overhead are particularly painstaking.
Do web design work for people and make it mandatory that your "credit" be placed via a link on their site
Inform bloggers that follow the same subject as you to check out your site and if they write something about it ASK if they can place a link to your site from their blog. Do NOT just try to throw an HTML into their blog. This is not only counterproductive to good business but just plain rude.
All in all, if you don't have the dough, you gotta create hype. Ask friends and family with websites to link to you. Ask random strangers to link to you (works more often than you might think) and remember that reciprocal linking still DOES give you a boost, just not as much of one as a one-way. Recips help quite a bit if you are just starting out, and triangle linking still can throw off the bot, but they are getting much better at figuring this out.
I have never asked anyone for a link, a couple of links from my own sites and submit to dmoz - that's it, let the site do the rest.
I can obviously see that in certain areas, gambling, pharmacies etc, have to play a different game though.
Good Luck