I run a chat and community site. Everyone always says build a quality site with good content and people will link to you, but how is that possible when the people that go to my site don't have websites? The only place my users place links back to me from are yahoo profiles and myspace, neither of these do any good. I have about 14,000 registered members in my site, do about 2,000 uniques per day with about 7,000 page views per day. Our chat offers webcams, voice chat, and image sharing in the chat rooms along with many other features. We have profiles with photos, personal photo galleries, videos, groups, and blogs. I mention this to show that this is a very comprehensive site with about 15,000 pages of content, yet I have never found a natural back link linked to us. I also made it so people can embed our chat in their own websites hoping to get some links but so far haven't found any built this way. So again, my question is how do you get good natural backlinks for websites not focused on webmasters?
Natural? Do press releases... Although the press release links won't be natural in and of themselves.... when people write about the press release and your site, they'll probably include some backlinks there. Seems like your site is doing pretty well without backlinks. =)
You can also do article submissions, other than press releases. One more way is there, to contact some SEO professional like us and you can get tons of links for your site.
try emailing related sites asking for link exchange. Even though you are both competitors, you will both benefit from exchanging links
Try to focus your marketing strategy on webmasters and what would made them be interested to add links/banners on their home pages to your web-site. Some sort of affiliate program could help.
What kind of topics are your chat room focussed on? If you have certain sections of your site about music chat... then find music websites/blogs and try to get links on their sites... this could apply to any topic.