How to use link building effectively to generate more leads online?

Link building in the most common sense is, in my very opinionated opinion, highly over-touted for generating leads. At least in the old sense of getting tons of links on any site that will take you or commenting on blogs just to get inbound leads. 
The very nature of many link building campaigns is about quantity and not quality and in the end will do you a disservice. You get back what you put out.
Instead, think about building great content and getting it shared because it’s so awesome. 
Keep your content focused so people know what you’re all about, tag appropriately and leverage the power of your social networks to get it shared.
Tag other blogs in your blog posts to show respect and ask bloggers to comment, guest post or just give them kudos and a link for a great post. 
This will bring you real quality in the inbound links you get and is more likely to result in quality leads as well.
Last and most important, if you do get more traffic how are you converting them to leads? Do you have well placed calls to action? Is it easy to connect with you through your site? You may have leads who are simply not seeing how to follow through and they move on.

  @jfoutsThank you for your response. I got your point. There’s no replacement to quality content. Specially the last point that you made was very helpful for me.Thank you

@rich-brooks thank you for your inputs. Yes i was looking for the importance of link building.

@jfouts in her very opinionated opinion (I love that line) is right.  I think people have forgot about the purpose of a  website and think only of traffic and getting to the top of G!.   Create great content or provide a great service or sell great product and you will get one way links that are relevant and so should convert rather than buying links of random sites that will never send traffic or have high bounce rates.

Content is still king

As for guest bloggers, they can be a boon to you and to them as well but choose carefully. I’ve fond as my blog gets more popular there are a load of people requesting to guest post on my site for the sole purpose of building traffic to their own site.

If the quality of the content isn’t up to par I’m doing a disservice to my readers and I say no. I don’t want to dilute my brand.
That said, if you reach out to people who are smart, write well and have established networks of their own it’s good for both parties. 

You get different viewpoints and free high-quality content and you both get exposed to new markets as you both share the post with your other networks.

Well, “how to” is by using link building as a signal to Google to move you up the SERPs. From there it is up to the website, meaningful content, and ultimately your offer, to get them to convert. 
Typically for link building we focus along the lines of:

1. Off-site blogs linking to subpages
2. Comments on high PageRank comments fields which allow for do-follow links. 
3. Press release sites
4. Social and review sites 
5. .edu and .gov links

@hemantpatil @jfouts @rich-brooks @robpeck thank you all for such valuable insights. Link Building has already been an inextricably interwoven part of online marketing campaign. With constant development and evolution of newer online marketing strategies such as social media and blogging, the value and effectiveness of quality link building has never decreased, and perhaps won’t.