I feel your pain.

Hi Phil Payne,

I had a site that, 12 months ago, was at zero.  No page rank, alexa
traffic rank at 4+ million and basically no visitors.

I put up about 25 links on a 'links page'.  No reciprocal programs, no
unrelated sites, just sites that I thought would be good for my
audience.  Then I sent a quick email to those webmasters basically
saying "nice site, I linked to you, here I am, feel free to link back".

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.  While I wasn't
even paying attention about 9 months ago traffic started to pick up
steadily.  A friend sends an email to me and says "how did you get a
Google page rank or 5?".  I didn't even know.  Sure enough, Google
traffic was up, PR was 5, alexa was under 1 million and showing 17
backlinks.

It really wasn't very hard.  It just took about 3-6 months.

Al