In my experience, PR rankings were easier to get than traffic.
My http://usacasinoplayers.info/
site was typical. Get an idea, create a site, add content and then promote. Promotion included gradually adding it as a sitewide link in my other blogs. I did this by adding a static link in the blog post theme in the comment file.
The site went to PR2 this way. Not great, but Ok if I wanted to sell a link (which I do not bother with – way too much bother for the $).
As an incidental (feeder) site, this blog kind of just ‘sat there’. Along came this little game, so I threw it into the mix. But google also came along and ‘mixed things up’ with these recent updates. Boom – PR down to 1.
To try and recover, when the opportunity presented itself, I removed and/or adjusted the sitewide links. The Alexa rank went from 24 million to 8 million (whoopee <- sarcastic) Adding the site link here also proably helped (hey, when it's bad - anything helps). But still minimal traffic (even with 1,100 google indexed pages and a pr1 – which don’t mean a lot). Onward!!