At the Link Building Victories & Failures Affiliate Summit session, Wil Reynolds explained that authority links aren’t always the answer! In his example, Wil explained how a client of his had numerous authority
links (fashion magazine websites) but still was not getting the same rankings as the competition. So Wil and the folks at SEER tried some different techniques.
To start, before you can ask for help, you must offer help. RT others, link to their content, build your Karma bank.
Some ways to do this for your niche are twitter searches (search.twitter.com or a column in TweetDeck)
Wil mentioned The Ontolo Link Building Book which has given him many ideas, and briefly showed Majestic SEO as a tool he uses at SEER.