Contacting site owners directly is another method of getting inbound links. This will have a lower chance of success in most cases but it is usually worth trying.
I hate those people. If I want to link to someone's site, I will. I'm not going to do it as some sort of trade to try to game Google, though. Linking to me might make me aware of you, but spamming me just makes the world a little bit worse. Ditto for shoving ads into my mailbox, affixing them to my bike or SEOing the heck out of mediocre content that most searchers don't want to see in the first page of results.