Can you get good pr without spending money on links?

I am trying to get good pr, my market is saturated, and I did "link:" on my competitors sites and seems like they are paying to have backlinks. Some of them have 400,000 links. Any ideas on how I can get good backlinks without spending a lot of money. Or if I have to spend money, I need the most effective way.

Write good content that will inspire people to link back to your site.

The token and yet useless response... at least throw the poor guy a bone...

If you buy links buy links on site that are of a similar theme (if you have a real estate site buy links from real estate sites) PR is not all that important but it can be a good indicator of which sites are best to buy links from. Also don't forget that you would like links to actually drive traffic to your site as well as help you in the SERPs so pick high traffic pages and make sure your link is appealing. Links with your targeted phrase as the anchor text are most beneficial when it comes to ranking higher in the SE's. There's more but I dont have the time or the energy...

How about some popcorn.

Content is the token answer but it is also the most realistic answer for long term viability. WeRASkitzzo is correct- trade or get links that fit into your theme.

A good back link from a high PR site will do wonders for your site. Also a DMOZ listing will help out some. I would write some articles and submit them to the article directories and you'll be surprised how many websites will use those free articles that you wrote and link back to your site.

I've seen well over 2,000K Back links created in a weeks worth of article creation for one of my sites. It's def a possibility to get good back links quickly, but in some cases you may be better off buying or Triangular trading links (Permanent links are the best!)

You going to spend lots of time and effort on exchanging links. That is the cheapest way.

You may want to look into an auto linking program or set up a recip required directory.

400.000 BL's and what PR do they have?? I have, according to G, something like 2700 BL's (Y says 197.000). This gives me a PR of 7, all natural, nothing bought or anything like that.

But why going after high PR, you can get a PR7 site with just a few BL's easily, it's serp positions that you want, PR means nothing for serps.

I would suggest you read Advanced Link Building by Rand at http://www.seomoz.org/articles/advanced-link-building.php - It contains 15 Unique methods for building links on the web. Includes detailed instructions, examples and links to sites/pages that can assist your efforts

Forget the popcorn and bone .Time to ingest sandwiches from my compartment.
Original content is my choice to(nothing beats naturally grown content ,but don't ignore the other appealing methods described above)