Theres no particular "strategy" per se... and I think that you have the general idea. Without any AOE (huntard), you should aim to run in and kill individual groups as fast as you can. Opinions differ, but I usually loot all the corpses as I go for gold/mats/gear. If you have a lot of gold on your main, I'd just skip looting altogether until you completely finish SM. Like you said, you stop boosting at lvl 50. General concensus here is to do this:

-Level to 10-15 on your own.
-Boost in Deadmines until lvl 20
-do some quests till 25
-Boost in SM until lvl 42
-Boost in ZF until lvl 47

I think that you cant go into SM until lvl 25, but it could be earlier.

After that, you should quest without the 70.