I found much of the same problem- While my first blog attempt is geared to letting the niche community know what's new across 7 of our sites, we did want to have some link trades to pull in a bit of fresh traffic and back links.
What I ended up doing was creating a section specifically for these links, and a second section named 'friends' which is for links that I genuinely like, and think that my surfers may as well, regardless of whether or not they link back.
http://www.balloondirectory.com