Niche Site: How do I know if I'm doing this right?

Hi Guys, 

To answer your question in the comments, Rob, I haven't made any more significant strides in my backlinking; had to put the niche site aside for most of the past week to finish some other projects. I've only posted articles to Ezine and HubPages but haven't hit any of the other 2.0 properties and indirect layer that Pat recommends. Those are still on my to-do list. 

Interesting note: when I look at my Google Analytics, I've gotten 7 referrals from HubPages (currently have two articles posted there), with an average visit duration of over 14 minutes. 

I am feeling a bit lost when it comes to AdSense and Webmaster Tools. I have them set up, but feel like I'm in a foreign country where I don't speak the language. Consequently, I'm not absolutely certain I have everything set up properly, and not sure how to know it if I don't. My site is verified in Webmaster tools, and on the Dashboard, I do have graphs showing up for Search Queries and Sitemaps (no data on Crawl Errors). Crawl Stats are displaying, so I assume that's good. Nothing is really showing up in the Traffic section, but perhaps that's just because it hasn't been long enough -- it's only been about a week. 

Are there any specific things in Webmaster Tools I need to be watching for? I'm not sure I understand what the most important and least important things are. 

Likewise, with AdSense, I think I have it set up properly, but not certain. I do have ads showing up on the pages where I inserted code, and I have ads showing up on the hubs I published on HubPages. However, when I go to my AdSense dashboard and click on My Ads, it indicates "no data". Should I be concerned about that? 

I'm hoping to get back to my backlinking within a few days to work on the other layers suggested by Pat.