I hate articles that offer the answer to a major question, but do not actually provide it. To avoid being hypocritical, at least on this issue, I will tell you the answer. 91. You need 91 articles. No more. No less.
If you believe that, I have a 1994 pristine PC I want to sell you. Rare and rarely used!
The simple fact is there is no definitive way to know how many articles you need to publish. The problem, of course, is there is no real way to tell how many links a particular article will produce. It may be one or it may be 200. It just depends. Not the answer you were looking for, eh? Sorry about that. There is, however, a particular approach you can take that will make your article publishing efforts work efficiently.
If you are starting a new site, you should publish as many articles as you can as quickly as you can. I usually try to punch out a minimum of 50 the first month or two. The reason you should do this is twofold. First, it generates links to your site and gets the attention of the search engine spiders which will lead to crawls of your site. Second, the links you generate will begin to age like fine wine. The older your links, the better in my opinion.
When opportunity presents itself, I snap up older sites that are for sale as fast as possible. The older the better as far as I am concerned so long as they have even a nominal number of links. The reason is the older a site is, the more valuable the links in the ranking evaluation. Obviously, that is a very general statement, but sites tend to age well when it comes to moving up in the rankings.
So, should you just blow out articles continuously to build links for a site? Yes and no. After the third or fourth month, I usually slow down. Google is known to whack sites that pick up links to quickly. What it does not penalize, however, are such sites if the links are generated to internal pages. If you are constantly adding content, and you should be, you can write articles promoting the new pages as quickly as you want.
Okay, all of that is great, but you want to know some hard facts. Across the various sites I work on, I have found it takes 100 to 200 articles to get the rankings I want. Some sites are as low as 30, but this has been my general experience. I should note that the keywords the rankings are being obtained for are extremely competitive and are often single words instead of phrases. Hey, why not go big?
