what are your programs that you use? ive used senuke and evo but only been getting around 20k and hasnt really moved from there...
400k, been a couple years as well. The key is understanding the different places you can get links, manually getting the difficult ones and outsourcing the more labor intensive ones.
i used blog commenting service for a month. Did it myself ;-) 28k backlink in a month on a 3 month new website. The website has nothing except the Hello World post on the homepage and its still ranking at number 6 on google for a keyword which is searched for 201,000 times a month globally.
Ive used no automation tools. All my backlinks are from sitewide link trades, forum links and sigs, blog comments,directory submissions, links with in articles I have written and submitted, blog posts, blogs that has published my articles, and the list goes on. Ive used NO black hat methods. Just hard work. For my main keyword I have risen from page 9 to #16 in 3 months. During next month I should be on page 1 for my keyterm. A friend of mine just showed me a screen shot of his stats, you guys aren't going to believe me but he's got 806000 (that's right 806k) links in google webmaster tools. For the same keyterm, he's ranked 23. That goes to prove to you that it isn't the number of links but also the quality of those links.