1. If you don't want to trade links you're fresh out of luck I'm afraid. The only way I know of to build traffic is to get quality submits and quality link trades. Oh yeah, and give your site a couple of years to mature.

Purchased traffic is more often than not crap.
2. Are you using a script or just updating straight html pages manually. If the latter is the case, then yeah, that gets boring pretty fast.
EDIT: After re-reading your post I infer that you are indeed maintaining a straight HTML linklist. A board search for linklist scripts should give you a few options.