I wonder if anyone is doing this with successful results? I mean creating satellite sites/blogs of the same niche as your site and linking from them to your site? I think Google should "like" these links, as it would be links from related sites (of course if you create a satellite site, it must be hosted on a different C class IP). And as for free blogspot or wordpress.com or any other free blogging services like e.g. okayblog.net or many others, will links from these help as well? - if you make some unique posts and include a link to your site (with your anchor text) in them? Or will links from these satellite sites or blogs be helpful only when they get some PR?
if done properly, it can do wonder. one important thing to remember that you need to use unique content on all the sites and make it impossible for google to find the corelation between the sites so that google doesnt realize those are networked sites (which means no interlinking).