If you want to swap links in blogland, do it the "natural" way, cite someone elses' posts, and wait for them to notice. If you keep writing quality stuff, you'll start getting cited back.
Also, blogs can do well in the natural results. To make it happen, you should sort out your basic
SEO though - change your title tag (unless you think ranking for "zinc" will really help you) - branding is just great, but ranking for kick-ass terms is kind of useful too. I just changed my title tag, and jumped from about #9 to #3 for one of my key terms in about 4 days.
Writing good post titles is also critical. Firstly, you can drop a few keywords (good for ranking again), secondly, you can encourage people to actually read your content (this is doubly true once you start picking up subscribers. They'll see your titles in their aggregators, and make a read / no read decision solely on that, until you get to the point where you are an auto-read, A-list blogging hero)