Best ideas for attracting back links - Any thoughts?

We have been finding it hard to attract natural backlinks to our site. This industry is so diverse and complicated we just don't know what's the best way to build links. We already tried the following ways



1. SEO tools: We have one of the best and long list of SEO tools around. We provide everything totally free. We did pick some good links but not enough to compete in a very competitive industry like this. We are launching 10 more new tools in couple of months lets see if we can get some attention there.

2. Blog: We have some active blogs and they do gain some attention but not good enough to gain maximum backlinks.

3. Articles: Rarely works these days though we have some good ones they just bring in a handful of links not the amount of links we are looking at.

4. SEO comics: We just introduced a new comics section to attract links its working but gaining little attention not the way we would like it to perform.

5. Transcripting: We have planned to do a lot of transcripting of videos of various search engine experts and SEOs. We are expecting attention to this definitely. we already did the webmaster live chat transcript and in process of completing some search engine expert's transcripts which will be live soon. Should be a mild hit definitely.

6. Introduced Search engine expert directory where we give free listings for all search engine experts around the world. We charge only for active links back to their site. Still not yet given full attention but it should be a hit pretty soon.



We are currently working on various other ways to attract people to link to us. Some of them cannot be discussed since our competitors are watching us. Already we tag some important pages to bookmark sites, but Search Engine related information are not the type of hit people are looking for. Its very hard to make people link to us next I think I need to do something really crazy