I am also a big fan of giving back to the community. Offer your services for free or discounted to a non-profit organization. Create some kind of contest to sponsor a disadvantage person to help them improve their lives. This works especially well if your market is regional or local. Local media are always looking for uplifting stories. If you work it right you get public relations, brand building, natural links and often indirect sales.

The “big idea” that I try to spread about link building is that it’s easier if you can stop thinking about SEO for a minute, and look for profitable promotional strategies that also happen to get links. Find ways to make money while building links, and you no longer have to care so much which links are counted.

Writing articles for distribution & syndication has been a very effective way for me to promote myself over the years, for example. I’m sure that some of those links are carrying some juice for SEO, but who cares? I make money on the traffic. If search engines ignored every link in every article, I would still have a reason to do it.