I've read a lot of good info on here and elsewhere about the "preferred" ways to go about getting backlinks through various methods, but a lot of this is very time consuming. For those of you with dozens or hundreds of "niche" sites, what do you do? Are any of these automated tools like Link Assistant, worth looking into? Is there any value whatsoever these days in these types of reciprocal link exchanges where I create a "links directory" on my site? I know it's not ideal and it would be better if I took the time to submit articles individually with my keywords in the anchor text linking back to my site etc., but it's not really practical with dozens or hundreds of sites. Even if I got 20-30% of the results I would get by doing them manually, one at a time by hand, the trade-off might be worth it, but I don't want to waste more time if it's completely useless. So what do you think? Automated link building tools, a complete waste of time? Any good ones?
Recip links are easily recognized and not that valuable these days from what I've heard. You can't really automate most of the quality link building - just try to get in contact with other webmasters in your niche.