I need a page rank...

I have got to work on my page rank here because I hate seeing those opps slipping away because I have 0 page rank. Gosh, it irritates me...LOL. Anyway, for some people it seems easy to get a page rank, in fact some get a page rank of 2-3 within just a few months. Now, that is what I need to do. But can that really happen? It makes me wonder if there is more to it than just going around exchanging links and submitting my site to search engines. I did that, but I am going nowhere, so hmmm...how did those people do it?