Time to work on the back links

I used to believe this too, until I realised that a lot of the people I was trialing for outsourced linkbuilding were themselves just using automated tools and/or user accounts with hundreds of other peoples links alongside my own.

Naturally it all depends on the markets your targeting, the level of competition, and how gung-ho you want to be. There are high-end software solutions that can build literally thousands of backlinks overnight, but they're the IM equivalent of WMDs. I'll intentionally refrain from naming them here as most are considered black hat, and if your considering going down that road it's best if you do more reading and find your way there by yourself. However, from what you've said these options are probably unnecessarily powerful for your requirements.

However, there are software apps available which are generally considered to give you less chance of blowing your own head off (metaphorically speaking). In my opinion the best of these are for social bookmarks (Bookmarkwiz, Bookmarking Demon), article submission (Articlebot) and forum profile creation (Sick Profile Maker).

To be honest I'd suggest looking for some high PR dofollow blogs that use a combination of the Keywordluv and "latest commentators" plugin - these will usually give you temporary sitewide links in the blogs sidebar. While these links are transitory I've seen them still showing up in Yahoo months later. Although transitory these are free, and providing you manually leave genuine comments nobody could accuse you of spamming!