Putting ads right from the start has always helped me with indexing which then takes just 2 or 3 days. The pages have to be loaded in the owner's browser 2-3 times a day to trigger the media bot often enough. It then drags the actual crawler after itself. BUT it really has to be unique content (either that or skillfully rewritten old stuff). As to the size, I've had same success with 20 pages and with 50 pages.
Then the whole linking effort is counted without diluting in the second part of the process only, which is climbing the serps. It is the set&forget strategy for useful sites that I use most of the time since the initial backlinking combined with the newbie position bonus for new domains shoots the site to page 1, it gets noticed, people like the content and start interlinking which keeps the process going without a need for more blasts months later.
This goes on until and if some competitor comes around in which case low level blasts are needed to prevent him from beating you in the amount of BLs in the first place and his will be crappy and yours are good. Usually they go away discouraged pretty soon.
