There are lots of ways to increase your links but you need to concentrate only on links from good PR sites, I think links with PR 0 sites have negligible weight.
For getting links from good pr sites as you said Article writing and submitting them on directories like ezinearticles , It not only gives you an good high weight age link even it also gives you traffic. One of my site got 30% traffic from 10 top Article Directories.
Other good ways are Social bookmarking, directory submission (on High pr Directories), Press release, Forum postings, Create blogs on good blog developing software like wordpress, bloghost etc.
I just told you most of free linking way but as you can buy links then search in forums, Most of the forums have Link Exchange topic through which you can get good deals.