One thing that you can do is to examine the backlink profile of your competitor's site. Look at the sites linking in and see if you can get links there as well. You can also get a decent idea of what ancillary social media work that they're doing and try to mimic that as well.

I would be looking to get mentions on high traffic places with user generated content like huffington post and forbes.com.

There are plenty of backlink checkers around just do a google search. I recommend that you try at least two as not every site catches every link. You've got a post on hacker news already so maybe you know more about it than me.

The preceding information is by no means a comprehensive guide but it has worked for me in the past.