A few suggestions:
The perfect SEO you're looking for and the offer of 5-10 footer links do not coincide.
If you really need the cash perhaps sell around 5 one year sponsorships for around $250. Have a section in the sidebar that links to a review of their site (not to their site but to a review of it). Sell these and you got $1250 to build the site with and you haven't given up a bunch of footer links. At the end of a year you can way up the cost for sponsorships or get rid of that plan with maybe creating a sponsors page elsewhere on the site acknowledging and thaning the sites original sponsors, but by that time you won't need to keep linking a bunch of pages or selling those kind of ads.
I bring this up because while it was a decent concept building any decent site 6 months from now when your having trouble getting credit as a legit content site as opposed to an affiliate and link trading sites - you'll wish you hadn't agreed to give all them footer links.
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