There are lots of ways to "make" backlinks and only a couple of ways to "get" backlinks.

Getting Backlinks

When someone says "getting backlinks" what I think of are organic or natural links.  In other words, someone else puts a link on their site to yours because they like the content.  This can take a long time.

I run an engineering wiki, blog, and forum.  By most accounts my Control Systems wiki is good and for some articles excellent.  However, the number of organic backlinks to the site are very few even after almost of year.

The primary way of getting someone to notice you is to visit blogs and forums that are already popular.  Contribute to the discussion - no spamming the site - and include a link to your site in your signature.  When someone reads your comment about a hot or controversial topic on the already popular site they may just follow your link to your site.  If they like it they might just post a link to it somewhere else.

Obviously posting to someone else's site works best when the topic is hot or controversial.  I imagine sites about an upcoming national election, for say president of the US, are great place to get noticed.  However, your writing style better be concise and well thought out.  Nobody is going to follow your link to your site if your posting is garbage or the same thing everyone else is saying.

Making Links

Making links is much easier.  You can buy links from various sites that will sell you a link from a PR 6 page.  You can join link exchanges.  You can post on forums and blogs that allow you to do so.  And finally you can write articles for HubPages, Squidoo, eZine, etc.

Writing good articles for HubPages, et all has become the fashionable way to generate links to your site.  This is partly because it is effective and you can control the anchor text of the link you create.  Google uses the anchor text to help figure what a page is about and therefore under what keyword it should appear under when a search is run.

The downside is that you had better like to write a lot in order to generate those links.  Also, sites like HubPages have a threshold below which your links will get the "NoFollow" tag.  Google largely ignores any link with the "NoFollow" tag.  You will have to continue to write good articles in order to keep yourself above that "NoFollow" tag threshold.  Or you will have to drive traffic to your HubPages, et all articles in some other way.

Writing articles is time consuming but until you get noticed or decide to pay for PPC traffic it's about the only way to create backlinks and drive traffic to your site.

Paying for articles

You can pay for articles and then post them to HubPages, et all.  I've seen some offers, which from a US perspective, are pretty cheap.  Buying 4 per month per site (HubPages, Squidoo, etc.) should suffice to keep yourself above any thresholds.

You will want to read anything you post before posting it to make sure it is on topic, well written, and at least 300 words (preferably 500).  Posting the same article to multiple sites is a waste off time as Google ignores duplicate content.

Article Spinners

I've tried a couple of article spinner software packages.  I wouldn't suggest them to anyone.  You can devote quite a bit of time to making sure that as much text as possible is coherent but in the end the article is usually pretty crummy. It certainly won't impress any human reader and Google seems to ignore most of the article submission sites that will allow you to easily and quickly upload articles.

In this same realm there is at least 1 software package that makes it a lot easier to submit articles to HubPages, et all.  When I find the link to the site I'll add it.

Google is well known for not showing entirely complete data on backlinks.  Yahoo is considered a more accurate source of backlink counts.  However, it seems to me that Yahoo counts all links with and without the "NoFollow" tag.  Google does not.