You know you can rank sites with barely any backlinks at all.
Find some good keywords that are buying-intent keywords, where the person who typed it in certainly wants to buy it. Stay away from exact product names, more focused on the general description of the product. For instance, instead of shooting for "Frigidaire 8,000 BTU Window Air Conditioner", you would try for "buy aircon with dehumidifier".
There's 2 reasons for this. The first is that every single store out there are all trying to rank for the "Frigidaire 8,000 BTU Window Air Conditioner", by default. They make a product page, they stick the product name in the title. Not a single one of them has even thought to try to rank for the buying terms that someone types when they're not exactly sure what they want.
Second reason for doing this, if they type in "Frigidaire 8,000 BTU Window Air Conditioner", they know what they want already. They're going to the #1 SERP (which looks like Amazon, Walmart, Lowes, Fridgidaire, Best Buy).
But, if they typed in "buy aircon with dehumidifier", that means they don't know what they want. They will actually surf the SERPs and you could get an interested buyer click on your site even if you're in the teens.
Next, you write the best damn article on the internet comparing the top five dehumidifying air conditioners.
Get yourself set up with Google+, so that your pen name picture will show up in the serps and increase your click-through ratio.
With that alone (and no backlinks), you'll get traffic and sales. I create a nice web 2.0 property every other day to link to the site.
Then, if you need to later on -- juice the web2.0s with GSA.
Keyword research is vital. Pick highly profitable stuff with a combined 400 to 1500 exact searches. (Like if widget (singular) is 170, widgets (plurl) is 170, buy widget is 50 and your profit on a sale will be $40+, you're probably going to get at least one sale a month. That's over $1 per day per article you've got.
I like to use a title that has the buying phrase and then has some kind of ending that generates curiosity. Like in the serps it'll look something like "Buy aircon with dehumidifier, She said the humidity ..." -- someone reads a title like that in the serps it generates curiosity. She said the humidity what? Hmm I got to check that out.
Heavily curate your articles. If you type in your buying phrase, you should come in to the top 100 results with zero backlinks. If your article isn't even in the top 200 ... it means you keyword stuffed and didn't write a very good article (you didn't reference related terms for the content). Go back and adjust it so your article naturally falls within the top 50 at least. I keep my combined keyword density under 1.5% (so the plurl and the singular keywords of the same term, I don't go over 1.5% for both combined).
All the articles on your site should be somehow related. Every article you write should be able to link to another article on your site ... the most related article. Then, after you write your article ... go back to other articles you've previously written and stick a link from that old article back to your new one. Each article should be linking out to at least two pages on your site, in-content. Immediately after you write it, you should get at least 2 links to that page from older articles.
After you've written 20 articles, those pages that were coming in at #30 are now ranking in the teens, under the weight of your own internal backlinking alone -- with zero external links. For this to work, every page in your site has to be of a high enough quality that it ranks for its keywords -- any page that doesn't rank is dead weight. If after 3 revisions you still can't get an article to rank in the top 50 with no backlinks ... delete it or completely rewrite it.
While you're building the site, make a decent web2.0 property every other day or so. By the time you have 100 articles, you should have at least 50 web2.0 properties. That's basically just 1 backlink every 2 articles ... hardly anything.
With 100 articles, you should be top 10 for every article on your website. Your goal should be to make at least $1 per day per article. If you targeted a 400 exact keyword, and you're in the top 10, you should get at least 100 visits to that page a month and if you targeted products where you're making at least $30 per sale, that's $1 per day.
At $100 a day, thats 3 grand a month. You should be able to sell the site for at least 12 to 16 months of income, which is a lot.
This route is a hell of alot of work, but requires very few backlinks and makes your site extremely stable. Near the end, you can start juicing all your web2.0s with GSA if you like, and those teens-ranked articles will all become top 10.
If you're shooting for higher competition keywords then add some expired PR domains to the web2.0s and write nice articles on them leading to your site.
