The problem with quality over quantity when building backlinks

Hello,

I just wanted to throw this out to members and get some views. I have been working mainly in the dating affiliate market for years. To get domains in this market to rank, you are looking at needing thousands of backlinks. Due to the quantities needed, if you look at the hundreds of dating afffiliate sites that do rank on the first page, most backlinks are what I would call low quality. Most come from blogs and forums, totally unrelated to the subject, they have just built up thousands over the years. I have also had success with this mentod of quantity over quality as well.

I have now moved away from this totally rammed market and started experimenting with highly targetted, long tailed keywords. Generally with low competition and about 2,000 searches per month.

To give an example (this is not my keyword but close enough to give an acurate example) "rain coat women" - I have a well designed and optomised wordpress powered site (revenue coming from adwords), 4 pages of unique content and the domain being the keyword

After 3 weeks of buying and setting the domain up and with some basic work (Press release, a couple of articles submitted, a few directory submissions and a few blog comments) it has now hit #8 in google.com - excellent

If I look at the 7 sites above, they average about 75 backlinks each (I have 50) but are all general online shops so not optomised for the keyword and only sitting in the top 10 due to their main domain authority and lack of any other competition. given that, I am confident I should be able to get to #1 spot in due course.

Now here is my question - I could carry on building lots of fairly low value links from general unrelated blogs and forums, social bookmarks, hub pages, web 2.0 directories etc as I would in the past for dating sites and hope that eventually quantity takes over and tips the balance and pushes me up. I feel this is however time consuming and always the last resort. I would much rather go with fewer links but from relevant, quality sites with PR.

The problem I have had so far with this is that working with a really targetted keyword, it is hard to find ways to build relevant links. I have spent 2 hours looking for any forums, blogs or other linking sites that are do follow and related to "womens rain coats" and found zero. I then move up to look for any relating to "rain coats" and found none. As a last resort, I went for the top level "coats" and while I found a handfull relating to coats, none that were open for links or had any PR or quality to the site.

If anyone has some suggestions, I would appreciate your views. As I see it, to get myself from #6 to #1 should be based on building 20-30 good quality links from sites in this niche, at a high level relating to "coats" or even better "rain coats" or better still "womens rain coats" but when there are so few places available to do this from, do I resort back to articles, general fashion blogs / forums etc.

I guess if the above example was based on a "black rubber iphone case" it would be much easier finding forums and blogs and linking opportunities relating to mobile phones / iphones and technology.

Maybe I was a bit foolish going with something like a coat and should have considered that this topic would be hard to find suitable places to build good links from.

Any comments / views appreciated.

Cheers
Rich