nice post rvince
I agree that this approach is 100 times more effective then building a ton of "splogs" on freehosted blogs.
its not so much how many posts you do every week, it's more about being
consistent with the number of posts you choose to do a week.
Don't have all your posts the same length because it comes across as spammy to the se spider. so just keep a nice mix. Also, when you first start a hand written blog, don't put up a ton of posts in one day.
as rvince pointed it, it's really important to build links slowly. I usually wait atleast a month before I even start trading links. Make sure to link to quality blogs. not those free hosted ones that have a shit load of ad's and several hundred links.