Do you want to market your website or do you want to get backlinks for SEO? If you want to market your website as you said in the post, then there is no problem with nofollow. You want to sell something to people, not to robots, right? People click on links even if they are nofollow
Agree, don't overlook nofollow links just because they don't give you true backlinks. I get decent traffic to my forum just by posting a few answers in the computers and internet section of Yahoo answers each day. And, they are targeted clicks... not just random.
Yahoo Answers may be nofollow, but it doesn't mean notraffic. It doesn't take much effort to start getting some good traffic from them, whether or not the link helps boost your PR or SERPS.
The best way I recommend is to improve your SEO.. you can use SEO tools for that.. and also keep on commenting quality content on high PR to other blog with your URL link..