In order to increase your search engine rankings, getting backlinks is important. But getting links from other sites can be tough. Here are 2 creative ways you can try to get more backlinks.

Start a Community of Websites
One of the easiest ways to gain backlinks is to start other websites and have them linked to yours. Blogs are a great way to get traffic because there's no cost, they provide free traffic, and are easily searchable throughout the blogging community. I've seen other various websites that target a younger audience even using myspace as a source of traffic and backlinks. And the list goes on and on for other quick sites you can start with a good amount of traffic.

Email Campaigns
Some people are hesitant to do this because they think no one would ever go to their site if the email even gets opened, or they have no idea who to email a promotion letter to. While the person who doesn't have an idea of his audience can easily fix this problem, I'd say for every website that has updated content that isn't gibberish, somebody has to like it and for every email sent out, there is probably at least 10% that the email gets opened if you target your audience precisely. Give yourself some confidence, and keep in mind that none of these techniques would get your website blacklisted or has any risk to it, except for wasting your time. But if you have the time to waste, research on who your audience is, get a list of emails of your audience and compile it in an excel sheet, and start your email campaigns. One person that I work with has a job site, which gets employers and job seekers together. Well all job sites needed jobs, so he started emailing to a number of colleges and got links for Rutgers, Harvard, and other colleges across the nation. Doing this boosted his Google rankings from 2/10 to 6/10. Just keep in mind that 1 email will not do the trick. You need to keep emailing the people in your excel sheet, but change the content of the email each time you do so.

Unless you don't a good amount of time to spend on getting backlinks, I wouldn't worry about how well your methods are working. Most of the techniques listed above as well as others you might think of should give you some increase in traffic that would last a very long time, as well as boosting your search engine rankings. These things suck up a lot of time, but the rewards can be high.