have you read the google guidelines?
amateur, professional, campaigns, strategy or whatever you are talking about still needs to follow the same route.
you don't need loads of time and money to make a linking campaign work.
naturally if you did have both of these then you would get more benefit.
here is the link for the webmaster guidelines
http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=35769
here is the spin off that mentions the reciprocal and describes the linking in a little more detail
http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=35769
your linking should be made up all the different types of links and not just focussed on one particular method