Article submission, video submission, software submission, Rss feed submission, these are the very good ways of getting one way link for your sites.
Try contacting webmasters of blogs that are indexed in google and ask them if they would like some free content off you in turn for a few links in the post.
for long term. build your own directories that offer reciprocal listing and then drive all your website PR with directory site you have.
Reciprocal linking is still very much alive and kicking. I've had some great success with this method. Don't just rely on reciprocal linking alone however, try to use a variety of techniques. Back in the day, reciprocal linking was all you needed, now you need a lot of things. Reciprocal linking is just a very small piece of the pie.
Does anyone have any non standard advice to give? This thread seems to be going round in circles. A buddy has a blog about link building here: http://linkbuildingbible.com/
I think you misunderstood me. I do approve of buying blog posts, as long as its from a related niche/theme to your own site. Some other things to take note of is varying the anchor text you are using when buying blog posts (to avoid search engines detecting you intentionally campaigning to increase SERP value for that search term) and how many outgoing links the site you are buying from already has.