I don't see why this page rank stuff is so elusive to people. I started a supplementary blog back in January, linked to it from my blog, got some links from a couple of sites and from blogs that found the content interesting and it was a 3 when Google did their update. It has about 23 posts and I didn't do any link swaps other than with my own blogs.
My main blog went from a 3 to a 4 and I lost about 100 visitors a day after the update. If I had it my way I'd go back to the 3 if it meant I'd get back those visitors that I lost because visitors are likely to click on ads where as the page rank doesn't do anything.
Page rank hasn't made a difference in my blog or my life the people who have visited and found ads that were useful and clicked on them have. So focus on the people and forget about the page rank stuff because you can't cash a check from page rank.
