With that being said, if you could let us know the poor man's version of everything you do. Or at least tell us if something your doing is expensive or unachievable for free or manually. That's all I have right now. I just built 20 Web 2.0s with no links. All of it was me manually with original content. This is the type of thing I can do, so if you could feed us this type of stuff too that would be fantastic.
One specific question. How to you phrase your titles and your permalink? Do you just use your keword? Two keywords in title? And is your permalink just your title or is it your primary targeted keyword?
Late responding to you, sorry about that.
I'm actually really into sharing how this can be done with little cash as that was how I started in IM... not that I did not have the cash but I was just dumb as a box of rocks and had no clue about automation so I did everything manually and still did very well.
For Web 2.0s, Press Releases (lots of free PR sites), Parasite Pages and the like, all you have to do is to write properly or even just passable content works. Images can be had for free using images labeled for reuse in Google Images like below and can be altered in paint:
Videos, which I have not yet touched on can be made using any number of free tools, I use a paid one - Screencast-O-Matic, in my instructional videos but there are a lot better ones out there you can get for free I am sure.
Of course you can, and I almost always do, use free themes and just alter/dress them up and it is fairly easy to learn and certainly easy enough to manipulate the look.
So, how do you get huge second tier links on the cheap? Easy enough actually... there are a couple of guys on BHW that have some good services like that. I've used the following and was very happy as to quality, TAT and verall customer experience.
Paper-Boy does kick butt scrape box blasts for 10.00,
tutughosh offers contextual links from about 6.00,
Peterngo91 offers a GSA blast for 5.00 and I'm sure there are some other very good deals for that sort of thing.
Don't have that cash? Probably not a problem as you can trade out some of your skills for some of theirs... I've traded services with a bunch of guys in the past and probably will in the future as well.
Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus are all free and just require a little work to turn them into value for you.
Many times you won't need those kinds of extreme blasts above if you have a lot of content and some content baclinking as well as some social media to get your pages to rank.
There is elbow grease in all of that stuff but it is just about free and was what I did back when I started... those sites from day 1 are still around and still producing so the ROI on them can be astronomical for a hard working person.
Titles/permalinks - I almost always have the targeted KW in the title as I see that as important but my titles are usually more of a phrase as opposed to just the KW. For instance (I'm actually doing this for part of this case study), a title could be "eBay offers cheap blue shoes" or "Amazon sells blue shoes at a discount". Blue shoes is my targeted KW but I'll toss in the other verbiage to make it natural.
Actually, with this site I am targeting eBay and Amazon niche products and going to compete with them for Google front page so those are real life examples.
My permalink is the title so it would be domain.com/amazon-sells-blue-shoes-at-a-discount. It is not unusual for me to alter the title a little so the permalink and the title are not exact matches too. That is another 30 seconds per page but it does add a little salt and pepper to the mix.
"I'm having a hard time getting any more pages to the front. I feel my site just needs a little umph. I'm hoping these 2.0s will help but I have a feeling it's just a piece of the puzzle."
Missed that I believe - a few Press Releases and a link or 2 from a parasite type/authority page may give you that little bump... see if that works for you.
