Best way to get your pages to top 3...

Hey guys,

I have finally gotten back on the horse and been pushing my IM again. I've had small wins and failures throughout the past 8 months when I started learning about IM. What problem Im having right now is ranking in the top 3 or even first page for my articles. I have a good initial backlinking and SEO plan when I publish the article but after that Im not sure what the best practice to go by is.

My current plan I use for backlinking each article is to post to:

My site
Eza
wetpaint
gather
go articles
blogger
xanga
squidoo
digg
delicious
stumbleupon

Within each of these, i have a link to my newsletter landing page and a link to another one of my articles on my site. I pingomatic each one of these as well as onlywire each.

I also post 3-5 messages throughout the day with links to the article on ping.fm which hits facebook, twitter, plus like 25 others.

All this is day 1 of my article posting. This is what I've done in the past for each of my articles. Im getting all my articles ranking but usually only within the top 4 pages. I am wondering what I should be doing for each article days or weeks later to push them higher in the rankings.

I've made a list of more article directories, forums, and blogs to start posting on maybe a week after I post an article so that I don't over do the first day backlinking and can keep pushing my article higher in the search engine but I would like to know the best approach to get your articles to the top.

I do extensive keyword research and Im not shy to attack a tough keyword but I the majority of my articles are focused around easy -medium difficulty keywords. At least 3k searches a month and low to medium competition (not in number of competitors but I focus on the strength of the first page in google).

I would like to know what your guys strategies are to backlinking after the initial push. Most of my high ranking pages are actually coming from the article directories instead of my actual website posts too which frustrates me but that will just come in time Im sure.

I would love to start outsourcing and using things like angela's backlinks, etc but I just don't have any extra money right now. I also work 12 hours a day and only can put in about 2 hours an evening on M-F for my site. Its takes me about 2 hours to do the mentioned backlinking above. After the 2 hours, my girlfriend wants to kill me for not spending time with her haha. On the weekends I can put a good 6-8 hours/day in but in this time I write my articles. I can get about 20 articles finished on a good weekend. I have also started recording videos which I haven't gotten a chance to post or market yet, but I am extremely excited about what may come from them.

Any help from you guys would be great. I would like to make a battle plan for this. I hate going into things blindly, even though my whole IM experience I've had no idea what Im doing, haha.