Encouraging Backlinks

[BlueGigs]

I know I need more backlinks to boost my PR (my blog is sitting now with a PR of 2 - not good!), but I'm not sure how to go about persuading people to link to me. I don't want to pay for incoming links, and I've heard that it's often not a good idea anyway since "link farms" tend to be disregarded by the PR algorithm. I know what link exchanges are, but I'm not entirely sure where to meet up with people with sites similar to my own blog (and from what I've seen, most link exchanges are hard to get in on without a PR of at least 4+).

Any tips?