I have a new and fresh site about insurance, i want to know the tricks of getting thematic links, if you give my comments in a blog, it leads to blogspam , if i post in a related forum there they do not accept link signatures, writing articles and posting it has very less value, ezinearticles is the only good article directory but they are taking too long to approve an article, if there is a small spelling mistake they took me about 10 days to tell it, Social Networking in my experience has very less value on building thematic links, Writing to a webmaster and getting links is really a hard process to follow. My head is breaking of , tell me the tricks to get the thematic quality links.
your niche is quite competitive.. you can also try other way of gaining links like blogs, social bookmarkings, etc etc.. try some of this link building technique.. http://forums.seochat.com/link-popularity-43/link-building-101t-124545.html
You said it all...if there is something that can easily get thematic quality links, then competitors will have only the killing intentions left to beat each other...in conclusion; with growing competition every day and constantly changing search engine algorithms, its a trial n error process!