Echoing what Sarah’s said, I do find bloggers are more willing to link to you once you’ve link to them. It may not be right away, but they’ll probably add you to their feed reader and scan your entries until they find one that fits. It’s something I do.

I also visit the URLs of my commenters and some may end up on my blogroll. On that same note, I’m also selective with the URLs left when someone leaves a comment (I’m lax on certain blogs, though). If the comment is valid and helpful, but the site it links to is clearly spam or MFA, then I delete the URL and leave the comment. Often I’ll e-mail the commenter and ask for an alternate URL, time willing.

The lesson in that is to be mindful of the sites you link to in comments and make sure it’s not a bad neighborhood. Participation in the community means being respectful of the other websites and their audience.

And since you were asking for other ideas (LOL), a while back, I wrote a post called Three Creative Link Building Techniques outlining ways to gain one-way links to your blog or website. It explores giving something away, having a contest, and the tried & true giving away something of value (i.e. make a viral product/ebook).

~ Teli