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Go back to your keyword research. Try looking for the terms that have the highest volume (Google keyword tool) but are least competitive (look at number of results in the Google SERPs).

Create a piece of content for that term and you have much more chance of ranking highly quicker, especially if you submit it to social bookmarking services like Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit, which can also be good sources of traffic.

I'd disagree with Larry - press releases do still have some value, particularly building links into your homepage, even if the just the press release aggregator places the link on their site they are decent white-hat links. There are companies that can distribute your press release to the various aggregators relatively cheaply if you don't have the time.

Sorry Jo, I completely disagree that 'the links should come naturally'. If you have a boring, functional product that doesn't lend itself to social media, or even if your content is just something that users won't naturally link to, you're stuck.

Elissa - one of the best ways I've found is to put in time to researching the bloggers in your space, crafting unique pitch emails for each one, writing some great content for them and providing a decent guest post, or asking them to include a link in one of their posts that relates to your page.

Blogger Linkup/My Blog Guest etc won't generally serve up decent quality sites any more you need to do this research manually, but you should be able to get some good links out of it!