Relevancy is king - so I would say both regular publishing of germaine content - and availability of research or quotable material (study results). Unless you are Dilbert...then cartoons would work great.

I think you are doing a good job. Your content is great. In my opinion continuing to publish quality content like you have will lead to good relevant links. You might consider putting a couple of the posts from your site on the DaniWeb blog to attract some attention.

Who is your target audience? In other words, does your site attract a professional audience, teenagers, etc? It seems strange to me that you can offer authorative research and online games on the same website, while still maintaining a well-grounded site with a single theme.

Sure. Why not? For example, you could have a cartoon portraying a parady of a current event going on in your industry. Something like Google and China embracing...*bad example*. Something like that.

Well when I think of "online games" I have stuck in my mind Flash games that teens and college students play. That's why I said that. Feel free to ignore me.

Has anyone ever tried linkbaiting?

That's an uknown word for me. Can you please explain?

About the links, the key in my opinion is the content. No matter how many link partners you have or whatever else you have done to get linked by other sites, the real boost is coming when your content is so good that people link it as reference to their articles, forum posts etc.

A great example is this: Before 3-4 months one of my forum members posted a very nice article about spyware. I guess that the article was duplicate content, but that's not the point here. The point is that a guest in the forum who was member in a major computer related forum posted a link to my thread and sent this way about 1000-2000 visitors to my site.

The best part in this concept is that when your content rocks, you don't even do something to get links back to your site. It is like an automated process

Linkbaiting is creating content that others can't resist linking to. Eg: reference pages, hot news story, attack story, humor or cartoons, games, etc

yes quality content would that is unique in its own way and in a niche category will make other website owners to link back to your page or site. But you have to be careful that there will be many other websites ripping off your content since without linking back to your site.