Lol! link hustling, I'm going to use that. I agree with scoopy and google about content being king. I have a site that has 100% unique design/content and people do just link to this site, without any schemes on my part other then creating catchy viral media. People blog, email, IM, digg, and I see these stampedes of traffic. it's very simple in my mind on how to have a successful site but there is an increasing amount of clone sites popping up trying to make a few cents without adding anything original. There will always be a place for SEO but it's going to become a much bigger challenge in the near future IMO.
There's more than one way to have a successful site. You can have content that people want to link to and visit again. On the other hand you could have a site that sells a good product: people visit once, purchase and don't visit again, at least for a long time.
you can rank well with unique content and great backlinks. You can rank well with crappy content and great backlinks. You can even rank well with unque content and crappy backlinks, as long as the keyphrases aren't competitive. Notice that word - unique. Not great, unique. Search engines right now have no real way of determining 'quality' except by backlinks counts. But they are all great at detecting uniqueness.