Before anything, make sure your iron is hot enough. I can't stress the importance of a good soldering iron for SMD work. Solder sticking to the iron makes me thing that the tip isn't hot enough. I used a Hakko FX888D set to 700 degrees and it works beautifully.
As far as soldering the SMDs themselves, here's how I did both my ErgoDoxes:
1. Make sure you use decent rosin-core (important!) solder. In my experience the lead-free stuff is a pain in the butt for electronics like this. I just picked up a roll of
this from my local Radio Shack.
2. I start off by applying a tiny tab to one of the pads, just enough to bead.
3. Then, I use tweezers to place the SMD with one of the contacts resting on the bead.
4. Apply the iron to the contact, and when hot enough it should just "sink" into the bead of solder already placed.
5. Apply a tiny bit to the other lead.
Usually I'll do the same step to a bunch in a row, for instance I'll do #2 for an entire row, then #3 to the whole row, then finally #4. On my last 'dox it was able to do an entire PCB in like 15-20 min. Both my ergodoxes worked perfectly the first time using this technique.