Link building in general just plain sucks. It takes a lot of time and effort and there's no guarantee there will be any payoff in terms of getting a link to your website. Anything you can do to make link building a little easier means less time sending emails, and more reward as you're targeting better sites.

Don't try and get links from anyone and everyone; the more focused a site is towards your topic, service or product, the more relevant the link will be and the more weight it will hold to the search engines.

Some of these techniques are pretty easy, others require you to learn some advanced operators for search engines but trust me, they're well worth learning as it will considerably cut down the time you spend searching for links.

Using the related: command to find similar websites
Eg related:www.mywebsite.com.au
You may have noticed that sometimes when you conduct a search (in Google) that a similar pages link will show up for many of the pages. This uses the related: advanced operator to give users related pages in the hope that if that search query didn't result in a relevant match then there are other options available.

Using this command on either yours or your competitor's websites will show related sites that might be worth targeting.

Why is this better than putting in a search query for your product or service and chasing these sites? Well, these are sites that Google sees as related and these sites are algorithmically targeted as opposed to what you may think are relevant websites to your own site or your competition.

Using the intitle: command to target sites using your keywords
Eg intitle:your keyword or keyword phrase
You can use the intitle: command to find other websites focusing in on your keywords. For example, if you were trying to find fruit shops in Brisbane you would type intitle: fruit shop Brisbane. Here's an example intitle:fruit shop brisbane

You will see in this example there's quite a few websites that aren't actually fruit shops and would be worth targeting for a link.

What you can also do with this command is add the words "add url", "suggest a site" or "add your listing" / "add a listing" and this will show you any directories or other websites that take online submissions.

Using the linkfromdomain: command to see who your competitors are linking out to
Eg linkfromdomain:www.yourcompetitor.com.au
One of the elements of a website search engines look at is who a website is linking out to. You can look at your competitor's links to see what websites they are linking to. This will give you an idea of the types of websites they are linking to (are they all themed to a particular topic perhaps?) and will also give you an idea of who they might be affiliated with.

Please note this command only works in MSN.

Using the -linkdomain: command to find people who have mentioned your company, brand or website but haven't provided a link
Eg "yourbrandname" -linkdomain:www.yourwebsite.com.au
This is a great way to get links as these people have already mentioned your company or website so getting them to link to you should be a fairly easy process.

Go to Yahoo! and type "your brand name" -linkdomain:www.yourwebsite.com.au so an example for SEOhub would look like:-

"seohub" -linkdomain:www.seohub.com.au

Using the linkdomain: command to see what directories are linking to your competitors
Eg "add url" linkdomain:yourcompetitorswebsite.com.au
This is a great way to pick up easy links. What you need to do is add your competitors link using the linkdomain: command into yahoo along with a term like 'add url' or 'submit a site'  Go to Yahoo! and type in:-

"add url" linkdomain:yourcompetitorswebsite.com.au

You can then approach these websites for a link back to your site.

These are just a few of the techniques that can be employed when looking for links. Remember, link building can be a painstaking process so using some of these advanced techniques will help you cut down the amount of time you will spend on finding websites that might be worth targeting for a link.