Some Newbie Questions

I'm by no means an expert, however I will give you my opinion regarding your questions.

If you have written 30 articles already then you might as well put them on the website in their designated categories. You can then concentrate on writing new material whilst your new website is getting established.

I would be careful about posting on forums and blogs as it could be considered to be spamming. Also, linking on forums doesn't carry much weight.

I've never really concentrated much on link building myself. I have relied on the quality of my content to generate links, in other words if people think content is good enough they will link to you. If your website falls into a niche and you optimise your website properly then there is every chance you will gain a high position on Google and therefore people will find you organically without you having to fork out any money.

Whether you like social websites such as Facebook or not, it makes sense to have a way of people sharing your sites on their page.

As for your last question, why would a competitor do you any favours? There is no way I would let one of my competitors promote their website on my forum, no way on God's earth. I have put years of hard work into optimising my website and writing good quality content, and certainly not going to give someone a free ride.

That's just my two cents for what it's worth

If that's the case though why would anyone let someone make a guest post? Essentially it's using someone else's site to promote your own, unless its a you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours kind of thing, which now that I think about it, it probably is.

Even though I know little about this, I would agree that it seems the best way to build links would be having good content (and the most honest if that makes sense). Even if it's not the fastest way.

I'll touch on your backlinks question-

In general, just remember that quality links from quality sites. A citation in a blog post from a leader in your industry is worth a lot more than any web 2.0 property you could create yourself. The best backlinks are those that drive traffic to your site from another in your industry, I've found that is usually a good basic gauge for a particular link.

Guest posts, creating satellite sites on your own domains, high quality web 2.0 properties (with unique articles, and multiple of them), are all some straightforward ways you can create links and have control over the content.

Stay away from automated solutions in general if you are worried about quality.

I would suggest you to post 20 articles to your site and use the remaining 10 to create backlinks.

If you are able to provide very useful and resourceful content for his blog, he shouldn't mind the single backlink in your article. Also, it is the best way to promote your website.

Keep it going and best of luck.

You've not mentioned it directly, but it is just as important.

In addition to content creation, you'll need to make sure it has good on-page SEO. That can include everything from using proper header tags, to headlines, to the page title.

But beyond that, SEO includes site speed. And for that, make sure you're using a good host. Don't fall prey to the "unlimited" hosts of the world (NOT unliminted in their fine print!), most of which are slow and harm your SEO. Avoid Godaddy, EIG (Hostgator, Bluehost, Justhost), Yahoo, 1&1, and Dreamhost. Use something better. For newbies, I suggest Stablehost, Site5 or Arvixe.

Since you've written 30 articles, just put them up when the site is launched. And when you have new ones, add them then. The internet has no schedule, contrary to misconception. Some of it is nothing more than superstition.