Hi Will,
Sorry for the confusion with OSE! A key thing to remember about having your links appear in OSE, is that it isn't about your links as much as it is about who links to your links :). OSE's crawl starts from a seed set of trusted sites and crawls links to discover new content in a trickle-down fashion. Therefore, the more sites with high authority that are found linking to you, the more likely your link is to be recognized in the index. This process is also time sensitive so fresher links are prioritized; meaning that consistent updates to your link building will behoove you.
As Andy mentioned, this process can take a good deal of time. There is no finite time frame that can be guaranteed for when your links will appear. The best thing I can encourage is to start building relationships with the sites that link to you (visible from Google Webmaster Tools, as Andy also referenced), as well as with high authority sites that you want to link to you.
Using the bit.ly link is a great way to get your foot in the door, so to speak. The optimal way to do this is by tweeting a link to a linking page (the link for a site that links to you). The other portion is that you need at least one other person to follow that link. Then you should be on your way!
I hope this helps to clarify the process! Feel free to let me know if you have any questions, and have a great day!
Jordan
Moz Help Team
