Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Yet another question about blog traffic.. I know I know, I’ve only just begun with about 11 posts over the course of the past week, I am blogging on www.adviceforateen.com obviously (hopefully) I am an advice blogs based on people 13-20.
I have a million ideas and I am good at coming up with ideas as well as being efficient in posting, I’m not worried about that, here are my questions;
1) about how many posts should I have (I average about 1,000 words some as low as 450 some as high as 1,300) before I start seeing some progress beyond 3-4 views a day?
2) where are some blogs I can post comments on even?! I can’t find any blogs in my niche allowing comments?
3) how long should I wait to put ads up, and affiliate marketing? I don’t want to drive away my viewers!
4) Any other ways of getting my blog out there?
A real downer today when I realized 26 of my 40 views were from me…
Any information on back links and SEO would be sweet, but I’ll probably look more into that myself as well.
Thanks!

Have started affiliated marketing of e-books about relationship and sexuality since October 2009. Till now, have problems in converting traffic into sales. I rely heavily on article marketing, till date, I have submitted over 200 articles on various sites, one of which is at ezines. I post 3 articles a week. I have also created a blog and it now has over 300 postings and have a daily traffic of over 300 visits. I have also signed on social networking sites, forums and also ping my blog regularly. I have signed up for back links or reciprocal links on various directories. Till now, my sales are very pathetic.I can’t even more than US$100 per month and sales are very sporadic. I have paid close attention to using keywords such as choosing those keywords which boost a monthly search of at least 500 on my headings and 1st few paragraphs of my articles.
I’m not sure what went wrong. I have been doing things very diligently, consistently and in a very disciplined manner.
I need some advice in how I can successfully convert the traffic to my sites into real sales as well as any other advice on how to turnaround my situation. Thanks for your advice and suggestions.

i have a website call http://www.goofblogger.com and i want to get it rank high so i thing i may need some strong back links where can i get some?
my niche is Affiliate Marketing

It has not been a while since I started by business, and I am in a very niche industry so I have <5 competitors in my region. One of my competitors has somewhere between 3,000-4,000 backlinks. I know that because I googled: linkto:http://www.website.com
and this particular company is always on the top 3 search result on many keywords I search for.
I am gradually building my backlinks (around 400 now) using directory listings, press releases, technology articles, youtube.. and many other legitimate sources.
another competitor of mine doesnt even show on the google search results, but if I go to linkto:http://www.theirwebsite.com I get almost 1.2 million hits. My theory is, they used one of these backlink building services which created a lot of back-links but made them loose credibility with google.. is this in any way true? are those back-link building websites harmful?
Any other advise you can give?
Thanks