Well, most of my lists contain Polish websites, but there are some English too: - aboutus.org/ - you need to create a descriptive profile of your website and ask the owners to remove the nofollow attribute from your link. You can post a few links if you want; - www.eioba.com/ - you can post links in your article but at first they are nofollowed. But if your article is popular and gets to the home page, then all links should be dofollow. You can also put the link in your profile and then such a link will be displayed in all your articles; - moz.com/ - you can try to post an interesting, high-quality and unique content and wait till approval. You can also put some links in your profile but in order to get nofollow removed, you need to get some moz points; - www.behance.net/ - it's a website for web designers and you can put the link in your profile, as well as under all your projects; - www.squidoo.com/ - I don't remember how many points you should get to make your links dofollow. You can also look for Q&A websites, those with website statistics etc.
Something that @shteca said that I think bears emphasizing - "Focus on forums and blogs that are similar or have the same target audience." It is my understanding that Google now wants your backlinks to come from like-minded sources. Backlink from sources that are relevant to your niche. If you run a baby site and get backlinks from a mud wrestling blog, Google will not reward you for it, I think.
leave a comment in blog is more powerful than you pay a services to create a backlinks. Otherwise, article directory like TopShortNews.com also the most powerful to generate an original backlink
Best places for backlink: - contributing to various forums & helping out folk who are having problems by providing good advice & answers. - Approaching other high authority blog owners & asking for permission to guest blog on a related topic. Of course, every content you deposit has to be unique, in-depth & informative. What DOESN'T work? Just copying & pasting the same blog post on different blogs.. & using software to generate backlinks. Take the time to manually search out a few high quality sites to backlink to your own will have more positive impact than using software to deliver 100's of crap backlinks. Az -