Link Building vs Link Attracting

As Google states in their webmaster guidelines:

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. 

Which has in turn created an entire industry built around building new links to websites. Unfortunately, this is an upside down approach to SEO.

Instead of focusing on building links, you should be focusing on ways to attract more links. In order to do that, you need to understand how links are naturally created online.

Needless to say, one can imagine literally thousands of examples of why something is linked to online. Perhaps it gets linked to because it's useful. Perhaps it gets linked to because it makes someone laugh. Perhaps it gets linked to as an example of what not to do. When you really boil it down, attracting links is about finding ways to motivate people to link to your content.