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Probably obvious but in a industry where there are many competitors, it seems like you can always find a couple of good links from each competitor that can be acquired. Maybe even run the sites linking to your competitors through OSE to find other sites in your industry with high page authority.

Thanks to all for the great feedback. I only wish I had read this last week. Unfortunately I created a subdomain. Unfortunately our primary domain is fairly antiquated and not conducive to blogging/social sharing, etc. (legacy to my arrival) so I guess in the  short/intermediate term I had no choice until we overhaul the website next year.

The general rule I work to in all aspects of life is, if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is. These types of links are very low quality and your probably sharing the links with spammy pharma, porn, watches and amsterdam esorts links. Don't do it! For $30 I can get an amazing article written in any given niche, and for an extra hour of my time, could probably promote it and attract the same amount of links! And clean ones at that!

I've seen some other South African sites like this that have ranked really well. In fact our brand name is a big term is South Africa, hence the reason I noticed the odd .za site appearing in the rankings. I'm not sure if the algorithm is different for the area and that's why it works?? To be completely honest with you, what you competitor has done may not be sustainable in the long term, but you can see he's got some easy links from 'high ranking pages'. I won't endorse it and sooner or later he may get a penalty, but he does seem to have found some easy wins for the moment at least!!