thanks ralph. only problem is finding sites i can get links from. i checked my competitors they are getting links from paid directories. is this easy to beat or no?
Maybe this recent experiment may be relevant.
A site that has been on the go for about five years had reached a plateaux as far as SEO is concerned. I have read many articles and tried numerous recommendations all with negligible results.
I think the results were being capped due to external forces. Recently as you can see from the graph I decided to start afresh. The “no-follow” meta directive was chosen and the decline monitored. When the queries reached zero “no-follow” was removed.
Surprisingly the recovery period was far shorter than anticipated and I was pleased with the steady growth until recently. It is still early days but it is looking as though the external influences are back and once again capping has started 
I may be wrong, the the impression I get is that such links are not well liked by Google, if considered at all.
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Have you read Google’s own starter guide and other information, available here?
I suggest you look at Google’s views on paid links. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736
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I wonder what could be these external influences though.
Yeah these are from paid directories such as business.com, I heard a while back that they got into some fight with Google before but I am not sure if I am correct. What would you say I should do?