What would your approach be

Dear blackhatworld people,

I have been a silent reader of this blog for some time now and learned a lot about SEO, altough I still consider myself a beginner.

I am faced with a problem and would like some input. I have this website for about 2 years, the site runs on wordpress and I have optimalized it for google, put good and unique content on the site. The site has ranked on the number one spot for quite some time but nog has fallen back to place 3. Place 1 is now being hold by a EMD (mine is almost a EMD) and the other one is a site with pretty good backlinks (not great a lot of directories).

My site has 92 referring domain from 80 different IPs. Will building 5 web 2.0 properties (manually) and building links to those (pyramide style) using software (like UMD) give the site a boost? Or should I keep on building my old way (trading and paying for them) be a better opproach? I am willing to invest a lot of time but will web 2.0 properties do the trick or is there a better way?

The site is Dutch by the way.

Hope to hear from someone!

Why not do both?
Obviously, you should concentrate on quality.
How often do you update content?
What sort of social signals has your site got?

Why not just pay for a few spots on some private networks here on BHW? If you're going to build web2.0s and go down the tier site route then you really need to know what you're doing as you could do a lot more harm then good - a few pointers;

Only unique content on ALL tiers
Drip feed your links
Make sure your anchors are split with a good ratio of main kw, long tail and randoms
Use a selection of different sites to post on.

Thanks for the help! Social is a good point, the other sites also lack a lot in that department.

This will be my first project to try some blackhat, if I fail then I will rebuild and I will have learned something!