Hi filejunkie,

The most reliable method is known as meritorious link building. The key principle for meritorious link building is "Attribution for useful contribution"

It involves 3 basic steps:

1. Create useful, highly sought after content.
2. Contribute useful content to third party websites.
3. Receive attribution, in the form of a backlink, for useful content.

I don't think profile backlinks to be effective as you think because many webmasters delete these accounts and also indexing them by Google is a problem. If you want to promote your website using whitehat techniques, you can use common ways for it:
Article submission,social bookmarking,directory submission, press releasing. Also its very good if you make linkwheels.