Why not focus on the quality for the visitor in the first place.. etc.. I look up for the 30 best related links to my site and chose them after what I think that my visitors would like. Then I send out emails to the siteowners in where I ask for a link exchange but I keep the link anyway, no matter if they respond or if they respond and tell me sorry.
But what to do if one's got objectively great quality content, but their traffic is still poor. That is what marketing is all about.
The main focus on building a site is for your visitors/users. As an SEO making sure that the site has relevant, quality contents is the top priority then rank to SE
By having a large link network with on-topic sites, the quality of visitors and amount of visitors can often exceed search engine capabilities. Especially if you are working with a smaller niche. By building your network of on-topic sites, you will create alot of targetted traffic to your site just through linking. If I remember correctly something like 60% of all internet traffic is through word of mouth and through links. So really there is alot of traffic around that can be picked up by links. And especially a few good links from authority sites. For example, if slashdot pick your link up as a story etc etc, you can expect thousands of visitors from it. So links arent just for SEO, but it just so happens that google and the other big 2 have based their algo heavily on links. Brad