Need Backlinking Advice

I'm creating SEO sites targeting keywords with a few thousand exact match searches/month and monetizing with ClickBank and AdSense. Most of them are EMDs for a keyword.

I tried paid links through SourceLinks for one of my sites. They made 50 backlinks on sites of at least 1 PR. I checked out the links and they are all blog comments- littered with hundreds of their comments of obvious anchor text for keyword phrases. My site was on page 1 for a day after that, and now is not even in the top 10 pages. (I'm thinking it got penalized and Google knows about SourceLinks' spammy blogs?)

I did not use paid links on my other site- it was on and off page 1 of Google for 2 or 3 days, and now is not even in the top 10 pages. I built those links all by myself as blog comments, switching up the anchor text with "here" and "click here" as well as some actual keywords and partial kw phrases for a more natural look to the search engines. Do I just need to build more of these? Are blog comments enough?

I have some random 2.0 sites of my own but there's not really any content on them. Is it worth backlinking from there? How about FB "ghost accounts" (no friends)?