In my opinion, reciprocal linking can cause you loss of visitors, so you better use the free techniques like article submission, social bookmarking, forum signatures, RSS feed directory submission, web directory submission and blog comments. Also, creating free pages on sites like hubpages, squidoo and vox will help you to build strong backlinks. These are some free techniques to increase backlinks.

Reciprocal linking does not always hurt you. In fact it never hurts you. reciprocal linking does help you get more visitors.....
I am not saying link to anyone..but you can link to relevant sites and not directly competitors kind of sites...

do blog commenting with do follow sites and create fresh and unique articles., submit it to different social bookmarking sites.

do proper on page and off page seo, these techniques help you lot.

Make a blog and write fresh contents each day and submit those posts to social media and see the difference...also create internal linking from blog posts to your main services pages with target keywords

I think the social bookmarking and blogging (not blog commenting) would help a lot in building backlinks. Using your keywords in the title and tags tactically would help you more.

Link exchange with high pr site and quality site

Try to create links from related areas for maintaining the relevancy and accurate backlinks for the website.