For increase PR you have to gain lots of dofollow backlink. Some source of getting dofollow backlink are comment on dofollow blogs, submit article on article directories by providing one resource box, join in dofollow forums, sumbit press release etc.
Again PR is about backlinks. Good backlinks with nice PR will get you PR juice. And yes, it was mention that the backlink should be a DoFollow otherwise no PR juice will pass to your site/blog.
Create squidoo lens, submit to social bookmarking sites such as digg, reddit,stumbleupon, create pages in hubpages etc.
I think content is very important in building links usually if you build quality and interesting contents traffic and PR just follow. But I think you also need to do more linkbuilding and gain more backlinks for your site in different ways which is mentioned by some people in this discussion
For pagerank you need: Good content + Backlinks from PR sites Do link exchange or submit to directories
Try to put keyword rich article with SEO optimizeed. Also submit your article to digg, stumbleupon, mixx, reddit to gain some backlinks.