Maybe nobody wanted to reply because you have a ton of things you need answered. Anyhoo, here's my attempt to answer them.

SEO is not old information. Stuff like title tags, alt tags for your images, keyword density and all that is still very much related to your site's rankings. Backlinks are extremely important as well.

The traffic from the safelists and traffic exchanges are extremely untargeted, so if you're putting in a lot of effort and/or cash into that, stop. Put your effort into writing articles linking back to your site and submitting them to places like EzineArticles and GoArticles. Also social bookmark your site using sites like SocialMarker.

The network thing you speak of is basically having your main "money site" and having a whole bunch of social bookmarks, links, articles, and RSS feeds all linking back to your site. To make the network larger, you can link your web 2.0 properties to each other, like writing an article which points to your squidoo lens which links to your main page.

If you're using Wordpress, then your RSS feed is yourdomain.com/feed. What you need to do is submit that feed to RSS aggregators like feedagg (to name but one). If you go the Warrior Forum and look up Big Mike, you'll find discount codes for his software that automates RSS submissions and social bookmarking. He has a lot of other useful pieces of software as well, some of which doesn't pertain to what you're trying to do.

To get people to view your blog:
-target keywords with little competition on the search engines, but receive at least some search volume
-SEO, get backlinks, social bookmark, write articles, post ads