Just an idea...
A lot of people are looking for links in order to improve their page rank so they get more traffic. Why not focus on links that will give you high quality traffic, these links would likely be from relevant websites, with good traffic of their own. These also happen to be the same type of websites that would improve your pagerank.
So why is everyone chasing so focused on the middle step, why not just go straight for the links that provide traffic and let
PR occur naturally?