I have a big network of blogs and free sites man, have over 1000 blogs and I just trade between my network of sites to improve my backlinks, I believe if a visitor comes to my site he either goes to a sponsor's site or to another one of my network of sites where I again have a chance to send him to another sponsor.
I am getting decent traffic but my methed of seo only works well with yahoo and msn, google tends to find my sites a shade spammy
So I don't trade links with any sites outside my network and I firmly believe the weight of reciprocal link trade is diminishing by the day, so if you do trade hardlinks with blogs or any other sites for that matter only do one way link trades, thats what I do and getting good results on yahoo and msn.
Lastly if you want to rank well in search engines quickly, pick micro niche themes.
For example, instead of shemale, I go for asian shemale, ebony shemale etc. instead of lesbians, go for blonde lesbians, mature lesbians, latin lesbians.
Build a blog based on a micro niche theme, update it regularly and get some links from similar themed sites which are already indexed in the search engines and you will see good results.
Ok now I am giving too much info, I better shut up