I've found that the easiest way to generate decent traffic is through blogs. Seeing as how you have a nice stable of writers at your disposal, it might be a good idea to pick a few domains that you own, or buy a few, and have them tailored toward a specific niche.
Fill them with some great blog posts... about 100 to 150 words each and with a few choice key phrases. Try to focus on long-tail key phrases as the more specific they are, the more of a chance you stand in ranking well.
Find some good, solid sites on
http://www.thunder-ball.net and initiate A-B-C trades. While not infallible, it's a good start in building backlinks that will win a few brownie points with the big G.
In addition to getting backlinks to your splash or index page, you should also develop a deep linking strategy. The easiest way to accomplish this would be to submit individual blog pages/posts to websites like
http://www.socialporn.com. The main goal would be to gain some links, but you can also catch traffic and bookmarkers from adult Digg-like sites.
Starting with a solid Wordpress theme, should you choose to use this publishing platform, is also a good idea. There are many free templates at
http://themes.wordpress.net for you to peruse. Try to find some that are SE-friendly, nice looking, and easy for you to modify for your specific purposes. You'll want the blog content to come first in the code, but this doesn't necessarily mean the entries need to be on the left-hand side of the template.
Wordpress is also very nice because there is a wide variety of
plugins available for free, and you'll want to try out some of the more popular ones like Google XML Sitemaps or All In One SEO Pack.
An important little tip that I'm beginning to see dividends from is to let the SE's discover your new sites by naturally rather than pinging them or submitting a sitemap. Once you see that they're indexing the sites, then you should add sitemaps in programs such as Google's Webmaster Tools or Yahoo's Site Explorer.
There are many nuances to building traffic with blogs, but in general if you stick to the common goals of regular updates, quality and original content, and clean linking, then you should find that traffic will begin to dribble, then trickle, and then pour.
I hope this helps, and good luck.
