Web Ring Links

This is sort of how the web "originated"

Before search engines got so smart, people use to find cool/interesting/useful pages on the web by just surfing to one that that they knew and then that site owner would have a list of links that they found that were cool. Finding useful sites was much harder back then and people linked to others much more freely.

Here's a little online t-shirt history trivia for you (not that you asked ): I actually started the first t-shirt webring waaay back in the day. It was called "T-Shirts! Around the Web" and it used the webring service at webring.org

It was so hard to find good sites back then that using a webring to link other t-shirt related sites actually helped customers find more sites they were interested in.

I'm not sure a "ring" per se would work these days, but networking, finding, and linking to complimentary sites that your customers might find useful to me sounds like a good idea. I do it on a few of my business sites and it seems to work out well.

It's when it gets into the "scratch my back (link to me) and I'll scratch yours (I'll link back)" type link exchanges where it's more for SEO benefits rather than actual human/people/customer benefit is when it starts losing its effectiveness to me personally.

I'm sure just by reading discussion threads here you could find other local business owners that you could connect via email/phone/private message with and link to. I know I've done it before.

if you have a budget, start an adwords campaign for your targeted keywords. don't use search results, only the content network. you will very soon get a report of the sites your ads are on. then stop the campaign and go to each individual site.
Check out if they wanna exchange a link with your or maybe they rent you an ad (practically an image that is linked to your site, as buying pure textlinks is agains google TOS, but an image can carry the same value if done right). these webmasters already have adsense on their site, so they are familiar with monetisation or exchange links for promotion / seo.
most effective is just to ring them up, emails tend to get deleted easier.

that way you get the most relevant websites to your own page, and thats what google loves. with the adwords network googles uses their own algo to determine what pages are relevant. they wanna max their profit with the ads. google still is a comany that wants to earn money, not pure world domination as some might think

if you already created an adwords account and set up the keywords, you might wanna try to place some ads with a maximum budget on google search results. just for a day or two. that way you can find out if you are thinking of the right search term and you can see very sure how much traffic to expect. thats valuable more than gold for your later seo / webmarketing efforts.