Link development has morphed into traffic development people. Stop going after the exclusive 146th listing on the tenth page of an unrelated site’s reciprocal links section thinking you’re going to fool a good engine into thinking that means you’re worth something.

Stop aiming for the engines and aim for real, live human beings. Aim for obtaining traffic and not backlinks. Aim for obtaining attention and not pagerank. Stop aiming for the affections of a mathematical computation and aim for commendations from breathing individuals.

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Old:
Send out hundreds of reciprocal link emails each day you find with an automated program explaining to webmasters how SEO works and how linking to your brand new website can help *them* in the search engines to the three separate emails your program scraped from their site.
New:
Find sites that are about your topic in general but are missing pertinent information that you provide on your site or that you can create an angle to merge with their topic and email the webmaster at one email address with a personal email that notes things about their site only a human visitor would and explain why you think linking to your content would benefit their readers.
Example:
If you own a site selling film, write an in depth article on getting the best low light results on your site and then contact photography clubs explaining that you have an article on your site that their members might find useful and you were hoping they would consider including it in their resources/favorite sites/information section. Get enough camera clubs linking to you and you’ll start to see a nice trickle of visitors as well.