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Thanks John, really looking for examples that I can learn from. Heard a lot of assurances that content marketing is the way to go, I'm now looking for concrete examples. Can anybody share?

Without any content you're also setting yourself up to get hit by the next monster Google update.  I would make sure you lay out all of these reasons to add content and the risks of not having any and make sure they are aware of it.  If they still won't budge, then just do the best you can and when the day comes when they realize they aren't seeing results they'll already know why.

This issue isn't OSE problem, it sounds like its your competitors problem. You should be using it to see what your competitor is doing, then figure out a way on your own to do better than them - Which from the sounds of it shouldn't be too hard.

Should have been more clear- usually for straight link building its 1 successful link response in 50 requests.  For bloggers its much better, usually about 1 successul link response in every 15 - 20 requests. Another great secret for link building on regular websites (sometimes blogs as well) is to pay for a "text ad" on their site if i see that they have stuff like that on their site already.  They will come back with some sort of advertising rate (should be pretty cheap for small websites) and you should agree to "try it out".  Pay the advertising rate, they put your link up, and half the time they forget about renewing.  The other half try to renew, and usually at that point i tell them that they arent sending me enough traffic to justify paying an advertising rate, but i will give them $100 to just leave my link up on their site.  Works well.