Excellent share! I learned some new things from this and I'll be sure to add it to my portfolio. I'm not a big fan of adsense but this makes me want to focus on it again.
Just curious, are you using mostly private blog backlinks for offsite SEO or are you getting backlinks from all types of platforms.
I own a lot of domains and I have access to high PR blogs and sites. All of them are having an authority look, high domain authority, high page authority, high PR, high trust flow, filled with content (related or not). With 20-30 power backlinks it's impossible to not rank for your targeted keywords. If you go for high power backlinks then, in a 30 days time frame, your site will gain authority and trust and start ranking for many keywords and many longtail keywords.
When you get these links try to send many of them to first page (domain.com) because, if you have a decent site structure and good on page interlinking, the power (pagerank, authority, trust) will flow throw all important pages and posts. The site will rank for it's keywords while your posts will rank for many longtail terms and solid keywords. This is the authority advantage.
When you rank a site for it's posts and pages using a low number of backlinks that is called Smart SEO.
With web 2.0 blogs I follow the same rules. I'm only creating solid foundation blogs, make them look like authority, drop power backlinks like I've explained above (this time, we're talking about less number of backlinks), interlink it's post and pages, add content with images - videos - outbound links to other authority and news sites within that niche and I have a solid and powerful web 2.0 blogs that sends a contextual link to the site I want to rank. Google likes it, the blog is created on a solid site foundation and looks like authority, I get hot SERP boosts whenever I drop a link so everything looks and is great.
I can see the long term potential so I'm doing quality over quantity in many cases.
Less is more.