I've been poking around the forum and some SEO sites for a little while now and it seems that nearly everyone's primary sources of link building are the following: Directories, RSS feeds, article marketing, creating link wheels, social bookmarking, blog/forum commenting, guest blog posting, facebooking or tweeting out content, and finally, hoping people will magically find and link to link bait on your site (which I can't see being all that effective, especially for new sites) Then there seem to be some slightly more creative techniques such as these: Creating widgets for other people's websites, creating WordPress themes with a link in the footer, coming up with badges to give customers that link back to you, posting on Q/A websites like Yahoo Answers, finding sites in related industries to ask for a link, and buying expired domains and redirecting or linking them to your site I think this is a pretty good start for any link building campaign, and I know it will help jump-start some people's link building campaigns, but I'd love to hear what other strategies you have up your sleeve!
Lower your alexa ranking by getting more consistent traffic, Getting .gov and .edu back links Decreasing your page load time. Outsource to professional. everything else you mentioned.
i tried created wp theme last month and submit it to lots of places, still not even 1 person has download it and install it, so it pretty hard to get links with wp themes.
cpa-money perhaps you need something to set your theme apart, it's like when you create a site, you don't want to go after a full niche but compete in sub niches it's easier. Same for themes I'm sure.