Okay well I've made a new blog and I've searched the net on how to build backlinks and how this helps bring up your pagerank. But I was just wondering how many backlinks in general do you need to get your pagerank to PR1? Also, I'm social bookmarking my posts and also adding them to article directories, so is there a certain number of social bookmarking and article directory sites i should use to increase my pagerank efficiently? Thank you in advance for anybody that helps.
Do not focus on PR for now focus on the backlinks. Check out some of my blog posts that gives you more details: How to Get Backlinks - My Way How to Get Backlinks to Your Blog There are some other posts and you can see them on my blog in Top Posts and Blog Marketing Tools section. Another good site for learning about backlinks is the Link Building Cookbook
With Squidoo, you can control (to a certain extent) how many relevant web pages contain backlinks to your blog. If you create lenses on topics related to your blog that are optimized to highlight keyword phrases that people are actually searching for, those lenses will not only provide backlinks, but they will funnel web traffic to your blog. This is only one site and one method among many. However, I happen to have a bit of a bias toward Squidoo ;-)
there's no 'in general'. It depends on the niche, the number of competing sites, the total number of sites on the web, the way google is feeling today...
Definitely. Also depends on the relevancy of the linking site to your own, the trust google gives the site pointing to you, and the anchor text you are using.