There is a post by Brett Tabke at Webmasterworld called "A successful site in 12 months with Google alone" or something like that, it's your best starting point for a relatively stable SE site. If you want to get tricky you need to read all the technical papers that SE engineers have written (especially those relating to Google) and be reasonably technically minded, some scripting and server experience is a huge help too.
SE traffic can be a real rollercoaster, especially if you like to push the limits a bit... you can be completely wiped out from one day to the next, so you have to have alternatives (ie. stable and non-spammy SE networks, or another form of income like galleries or free sites) until you can build up the traffic again.