Today, a person on a forum I frequent asked the following question:
How many articles do you need to write for each niche/affiliate product?
A great question. Here's my response:
There are so many different factors involved, that picking an exact number of articles is nearly impossible.
What is the purpose of the articles? Are you simply trying to sell an affiliate product? Or, are you sending traffic to a landing page? Is it a forum you started that you want to get off the ground?
For me, when I am in the early stages of marketing a particular affiliate product, I try to get an estimate of the conversion rate of the affiliate salespage. I am trying to get between 200-300 visitors there, and see how many of them convert to sales.
If I am doing a simple top level domain name redirect, then the number of visitors will equal the number of URL clicks from my Ezinearticles.com account.
Now, different long tail keywords have different amounts of search demand. I may be able to find 10 keywords that each get approximately 100 daily searches on Google (so the group demand will be 1000 searches). But in a different niche/affiliate product, I may be able to find 5 keywords that get about 200 daily searches each (again, for a total seach demand of 1000 a day).
After I get 200-300 visitors to an affiliate salespage, I can get a fairly good estimate of whether the conversion rate is high enough for me to continue sending traffic to it. Once I find a winner, I try to write and submit at least 1-2 articles per week for it (if not more).
JoeMack