Exchange Linking of Blogs

I was searching the internet for the answer on how to avoid Google's deindexing pages of my blog. But almost all the people in the internet is talking one thing, that is, backlinking from other blogs or websites to the affected blog.

Of course I know how to earn backlinks for my blog. I can do it in different things like:

1. Article Marketing. There are lots of websites out there that accept articles written by different people. These articles can be republished into the other websites. And as the compensation to the writers of the articles, links back to their websites were provided in the article. But of course, it's the article writer himself who will provide the link. The management of the website will not touch anything from the article. With this, your blog will already got backlinks from that website. However, once the article will be picked by other webmasters and published it at their own website, another backlinks will be earn by your blog or website.
2. Social Networking sites. There are social networking sites that share some backlinsk to the original article or source article. But not all social networking sites do that because other put the rel nofollow to the links.
   
3. Exchange Linking....

Well, they said that exchange linking is the easiest way to gain backlinks. But for it's the hardest.

I am already blogging for almost 5 years already but until now, I haven't exchange link to other blogs. I am a failure on this.

But, I think, it's not yet the end of the time. I can still ask other people to exchange links with my blogs. The only thing that I should do is do the first step because experts said that the first step is really the hardest thing to do. But once you already did the first step, the following steps are just easy.

So, should I start now?