Thanks for this!
Would you recommend any guides to manually building my T1?
Yessir I'll just give you a brief description of what I typically do..
Get a nice list of Web 2.0's which have high authority domains, get a nice list of variations of your KW's and LSI's, manually write articles of 600+ words (or re-write articles from other sites so they're 100% unique) and then link back to your money site in varying ways - this means via images, in different locations like footers, sidebars, contextually - vary the structure of the URL frequently to appear more natural (http:// or no http:// or www. or no www. or trailing / at the end, or no trailing / at the end), vary the anchor text frequently and rather than using the exact keywords you can do things like put the keywords in the text close to the link, but not as the actual anchor text for some of your links...things like this are the only way to keep from creating obvious footprints.
Use different email accounts and different usernames for your web 2.0's, or at least make sure any public profile doesn't associate all your web 2.0's together by having the same personal info, contact info, etc. (check privacy settings for the various accounts you create).
Also don't build them all at the same time / same day - space it out... because time stamps could be another trail.
Make sure to use a lot of DIFFERENT 2.0's and other platforms besides web 2.0's to give a nice mix / diversity in your profile.
Don't interlink these tier 1's - and if you do, make sure you're discrete about that, applying the same principles described above to make it not obvious and more naturally appearing.
Don't limit yourself to just these steps, there are hundreds of ways to hide your footprint while still building nice quality links. Above everything, don't use the same seed article for every T1 link, even if you're manually re-writing them they will eventually show similarity between varying articles. It's no secret that duplicate content is bad practice these days, and if you're getting away with it now I wouldn't count on it in the long term.