Backlinks for different longtail keywords to domain OR individual pages?

I'm setting up some mini-sites, and I want to drive a certain amount of traffic to each of them. So for a particular mini-site of say, 6 pages, would I create backlinks for different keyword phrases pointing to the domain/main page, or would I create backlinks to each individual page?

Also, for keyword phrases that have searches around 2000/mo and an average pagerank of about 3 (average of the top 10 sites), would I be able to get on page 1 with a few backlinks (Angela's packets)? Or would it be a more time-consuming affair where I need more backlinks?

I know that marketing an article on Ezine can easily get to page 1 for the above scenario, but it seems to me that this idea introduces a middle man (Ezine), which will not get me that many visits. Josh Spaulding uses this idea in his $5 formuila, and I've tried it for a couple of sites (submit 20+ articles to top 3 directories, 10 articles to 30 more directories), and I'm not really seeing the results. Given that, for the next few sites I'm creating, I thought I'd target a higher number of less competitive keyword phrases and try to get on page 1 myself, rather than have my article on Ezine be on page one. I just find that writing 20+ articles for each mini-site gets expensive or time-consuming and am looking for a better solution. Any advice on adsense mini-sites is appreciated.