blog commenting is my favorite. It may be tedious for few, but it's better than waiting for webmasters to respond or paying for links. This is just my view, you may not agree with it.
If you are fortunate to have a high quality website, then finding key partners in your niche is definitely efficient.
I see someone voted for social bookmarking... Im still not familiar with how that works..... how can I go and social bookmark my own site for backlinks????
I like forum posts, and emailing webmasters... But I think in the end if you spread your workload out your results will be better. Right now I’m trying to figure out a work flow that I can do every day in about 4-5 hours. First I do like 5 blog comments on 4 different blogs, helpful stuff, like answering questions and such. Of course I do this to not only help the person asking the question, but also to get my signature out. After this I search through DP’s forum for people that might want to trade links with me, send them a PM. Then I go through Google and other search engines looking for websites similar to mine, and email the webmaster for a link exchange. I have a very unique niche so it’s difficult and tedious sometimes. After emailing about 20 people, I go through the blogs again, seeing if anyone answered my questions, or need a quick reply. When all that’s done I check my email to see if anyone has gotten back to me. Then I find some auto submit link exchange websites, and do a couple of those. I don’t have much money to spend on this website so all the advertising I do only takes time, and not money. Doing it this way it keeps me doing different things, so I don’t get board doing one thing over and over. For the record I don’t think there is one best link building technique, it all depends on your niche and how much time you have to dedicate to your website.
My personal favourite is blog writing - but the most effective and powerful has been begging for links from webmasters responsible for authoritative sites
mine is all diff, i make free wordpress themes and put hidden links in the source files and yeahh, i include in the license that they cant remove my link from footer.
Seriously.. none of the above is my my favorite or would I call best link building technique. You should have made an option - Develope a High Quality Niche site and wait for people to link to you automatically rather than you go behind them running for links..! If you have content, quality and good exposure. links will eventually reach you! And yea.. some creativeness and innovatiness helps a lot! Voted for others.. as I would not vote the best for others.
The best technique is the one that works best for your type of site. It depends on your budget, the content you have, the niche you are in, and many other factors. Anyone who chooses one over the other without knowing all the facts knows very little about promoting a website.