My views on this topic. 1) writing articles on your site or analysing things on your site which no one has done before. Too much content recreation nowadays. Every blogger talks about blogging from one angle or another. But the backlinks go to the one who is talking of it from a very unique stand point. So, you need to be unique with your point of view. The same 10 ways to do this or 10 ways to do that is not going to help i feel.
2) Guest posting is the only safe long term way to get backlinks. Because the way google is going, i dont know what new policies it will bring time and time again. During penguin a lot of blog directories were discredited. In fact, even guest post forums were discredited.
3) people are not accepting guest posting nowadays, because if i have a page rank of 5 then i will get a lot of guest post requests. But at that stage, i am unlikely to give backlink to any site. So i will check the site ranking of the guest poster. And if that site is not a page rank 2 or 3, i will not link back. They might consider other things and not only page rank.
