I know that having a link on a site is valuable, but does it have to be in the form where people are able to click it, or can I just have the text there? For example, do I have to have a link on a page where people can just click it, or can it just be the text like, mysite.cooom, where people would have to copy and paste it (or just type it in the search bar) to get to the site?
I've never heard of this being a benefit. Google/Google spiders care about how many links are coming to your site, not how many sites have text that may pertain to your site.
It need to be a clickable link(hard link) so that google spider or other search engine spiders can crawl and count your link as a backlink.
well if the link you get is from the top of the page than it looks more important than a link in the footer, so i guess there is a little effect of where do you post the link
hmm when google robots crawls your link then generate a backlink. all depend on google algorithm process.
you need to choose anchor text get more click, and link should be placed on the position where use may link on that link, if you are taking link on blog so try to get link on blog roll which will count in every page of that blog