How many articles? Measuring results vs effort

Just use the big sites for your articles and don't forget the strategy of deep linking.
Say you have a site with 10 pages all different keywords, don't always link to your home page with the article. And.....bookmark some of these pages to web 2.0 sites. Then...bookmark your articles also. Then.....put a link back to the article on the page it refers to. There's tons more you can do, but that is good for starters.

As for writing from scratch? Hmmm good luck with that....I use free PLR articles and do a modify on them. Takes 15 mins max.

You see those 4 buttons below the post? They are social bookmarking buttons...gives you backlinks. There are hundreds of these sites. Check out a product called bookmarking demon on this forum for more info. I can't post links, but if you view eddiewolfe on twitter, I am giving away the smr blueprint in one of my tweets.

You are right, you need a lot of articles, and here are a couple of guidelines that may help you out:

1. In the bio box, don't only link to your home page, but link to your inner (interior) pages

2. Submit your original article to EZA first, and then rewrite it and submit to the big 10 directories like articlebase.com, goarticles, etc.

3. For some of your articles, use a service like AMA or UAW and submit big scale.

4. Turn your articles into videos and submit them to youtube and others.

5. And this one always make me more money.... Turn your articles into an ebook, and sell them

6. Even more money: send people to a squeeze page, and sell them more of your stuff or affiliate stuff.

All the best,
Franck

I have a different solution.

Write you best articles for EA Go and the top directories.

Then write another article and spin it to where there is at least 30% spinnin' but more like 50%.

Use a service such as UAW or use software such as PAR or MAR which will spin for you.

Once your articles are approved on say EA submit your authors bio for like products to RSS agregators.

When linking to your your site with links .. link to your inner pages first. Once those are all ranked and seem to have a place in the serps then submit links to your home page.

When social bookmarking do the same. Inside out on your linking.

Competitive with very tough competition may require several hundred article backlinks. If you found a sweet niche where the sites are not optimized, title tags are missing with weak descriptions it may only take an article or two to rank in the first 5 results.

With building links too fast I have never seen a problem personally with article linking. If you are concerned about building links too fast you may want to do some research because there are some who claim it is a problem.