Your pages should load quickly, your images should be small and forget all that fancy schmancy crap. Simple Stupid is still a good rule to follow. I submit to others throughout the month as I surf around. There are many many services that can help you with this. Join a few service sites like Hitography.
Shared links are a great way to build traffic.
I use the Zeus Robot to build theme based link pages quickly and easily. If you can afford it you might want to run an affiliate program. I run mine through bCentral. So, Now that you have lots of traffic you have to get those visitors to look around. If you think you've got this licked then we can move on.