Building Backlinks?

[KevinJB]

Hey, what tips would you all suggest to a new webmaster trying to build up backlinks to his site? Specifically, the things I am doing are:

Links in my signature
Affiliating with similiar sites
Threads on forums I frequent
Commenting on others blogs


Note that by 'Affiliating with similiar sites' I don't mean auto-affiliating programs, when I see a site with an affiliates section with similiar content to mine I manually email the webmaster and exchange links.

What else should I do? I've heard writing articles and submitting them to free article sites with a tagline containing a link to my site is helpful, but I'm afraid my content will get stolen.

Any and all advice is welcome!

[zokiii]

Try to get one-way topic related backlinks.
They worth the most.

Those links from signatures are devalued, they have some weight but it is so small.