There are 2 powerful methods to get people to link to your site.

1. Create great content and publish on your site. When you publish unique, informative and useful content on your site and if people can find it (does it smack of a catch-22 situation there?), they will link to it without you asking for a link. Also you do not require to link back to them.

2. There is an easier method to get a good number of one-way incoming links to your site. Writing and distributing press releases for your site can do the trick. While this is not easy too, you can come up with fairly acceptable stuff pretty easily with the plethora of guides available for this purpose. The links from the press release sites are relatively more respectable.

These releases can give you a nice spike of traffic while they are fresh. Since most of the press release portals archive your release on their sites, you can look forward to a few permanent links pointing to your site.

You get more bonus links from other website owners who pickup your release from these sites and republish these on their web property. They get content to increase the number of pages on their sites and may be earn Adsense income from ads on these pages; you get the much desired exposure and incoming links.