Make a gmail for each of your blogs. Make 2 email categories: Accepted and Rejected Go to http://www.web-directories.ws/ (not my site but I love it) Go to the niche category Submit your blogs to all niche directories Go to the free category Scroll down to the regular listings There are 99 pages of free directories in descending PR order. Spend one full hour every day doing nothing but submitting your URL to those sites Continually sort your emails with which directories have accepted you and which have rejected you Go through your rejected folder once a week and re-apply to all rejected categories Once you've gotten through all 99 pages of directories you're probably ranking pretty high in Google and may not need to continue, but it never hurts to have more links! Go to the geo-targeted directories and begin submitting there. ??? PROFIT! EDIT: Sometimes using automatic directory submissions will get you sandboxed by Google. This usually is not permanent. If you're going to the directory submission route, it's better to focus on good copy for a higher click-through rate, rather than just whatever that's used mostly for the backlink.
I do manual DoFollow blog commenting on PR pages relevant to my niche, and it works well! This is pretty much the same method and it definitely works! Regardless if it takes forever, it's good for traffic. I don't care how long it takes, because it will pay off in the next PR update!
That's true, do follow blog comments (and just blog comments in general, since they get you traffic) are awesome. Directories tend to last longer than blogs, though.