I just made my first non-porn site. How much should I expect to pay for hardlinks to a mainstream site? How important for SEO is it that the sites be of similar subject matter (swimming pools) ?
Congradulations! Stay away from buying text links, you want to build natural quality relevant backlinks, they are the best in terms of proper link building. You can try doing a "few" link exchanges to get the ball rolling, try to exchange the links inside of content rather than a link\menu box.