noob journey has come to a standstill

Hey all! I am new to this board but I have been spending a lot of time reading through threads. Last month I finally jumped in. I chose a topic that I knew a lot about and registered a domain related to the keyword(s).

Things I have Done in the last twenty days (in order):

• purchased a domain + hosting
• wrote 4 pieces of unique content - over 300 words apiece (with 4 more in the works right now)
• applied for google adsense on a six month old blogger blog that I had previously created but never used
• installed and set up helpful plugins on wordpress while waiting for google to index the site
• submitted one of my pages to reddit and received a conversational comment and five up thingies (recommendations)
• tried to create 10 backlinks manually but only one is live and it is no-follow
• checked the SERP of my site and for one of the main keywords I ranked #42. I know that's not great or anything but it is so exciting to see!

My question is what do I do next? I am having trouble finding places that allow linking. I was thinking about purchasing a small order of links but I read on this board that is generally not recommended. I just need to start inching up in the rankings and I need to do it all by hand for now - any suggestions on how I should proceed? Facebook marketing? Focus on creating web 2.0's? Forget all that and just create unique content? I'm soooo confused right now and want to try EVERYTHING...which I know is a quick way to failure so any help is appreciated.

Also, since I do have a history on the internet is there some way I could utilize my old accounts such as livejournal or youtube to promote the site? Keep in mind that the accounts have content that is completely unrelated my keywords. I have a four year old livejournal and a five year old youtube account with almost 700 real subscribers (I was offered to apply for youtube monetization but I ignored it because the videos are from my internet fandom days - Doctor Who, Smallville, and merlin were my sh!t!) Is there anything that I can do with these two older accounts to help build my website?

Side Comment About Google Adsense Approval: I applied for google adsense on a six month old blogger blog that I had created but never posted on. It took two days for them to partially approved me. They only partially approved me because my site was lacking content or something to that extent. After reading that email I went on the blog and copy and pasted a few of my college essays as posts (a trick I learned from this site but I cannot remember the OP). It took less than 24 hours for my account to be approved after I posted the essays. Just a tip to try and help others get approved

Build links and add content to your site. You don't know where to build links, yet you just listed two locations you have complete control over: Youtube and your LiveJournal. Youtube allows links in your profile AND in the description of every video. Your links don't need to be relevant to the content at all.

Other good places for manually building links are web 2.0 sites and article directories like ezine. Just get used to writing...a lot Also, when/if you have money to spend, there is nothing wrong with buying services on this forum. Most of the people making serious money use those all the time because we're too busy to be writing tons of content and doing all this stuff manually.

Yeah as Ryanjm said build backlinks, get more much more content, 4articles per day.
Get scrapebox

Thanks for taking the time to reply, ryanjm. I write articles online for a living at this point in my life so I can definitely handle that. I really appreciate the info about youtube - I added the website to my channel page but not to any of the videos - I have 90 of them but to be safe I think I will post a link on the ten with the most traffic.

to ants10: Thanks for the tips! Because I write articles already for a living I think I might trim it down to two articles a day - just to prevent burn out. That would bring me to at least ten new articles a week. If I go with unique content for the web 2.0's I could write one new article for the main site and one for link building.