Questions about Long-Tail Keywords

While I've been checking out the competition in my niche, I've noticed that a few of my competitors have been targeting specific product names as a long-tail. They do this by first making the top 10 list full of affiliate links (the money maker), then linking to a more in-depth informational article review for each product.
I've been researching to see if this is a good strategy, but I have a few questions I'd be grateful if anyone could answer.

1. I noticed in my research that some people said its bad to make entire articles optimized around a specific longtail, while others said it was okay. Most info I found was around 2 years old (ages) so which is it? Is stuffing an article full of long tails better?

2. Is it worth ranking in long tails I can't use to boost money articles? Would that help in ranking other keywords, or is it pointless?

3. Basically a followup to the second question, would a separate SILO that's purely informational with no affiliate links help my site rank the money articles? Even if it doesn't directly link to them? Would the strength I get from it (if any) even be worth it?

Thanks for any answers you could give!

Linking to full review page with enough content is far better than adding lots of affiliate links on a page, when you search for any keyword you'll hardly find any page ranking top and filled with lots of direct affiliate links especially a popular niche.

1. repeating long tail keywords alone won't favor your rankings these days, if you want proof; type any long tail keyword of your choice in google, open the top 3 results, find out whether that long tail keyword is exactly present in those pages! I've done this multiple times and i haven't find a single page on the top three that contain the exact long tail keyword, only some variations of it. just include the long tail keyword in the title and write your content naturally.

2. If you're not ready to invest some money on backlinks, you should definitely write your content on long tail keywords.

3. Not all the content on your keyword should contain affiliate links, you should write a few information posts without affiliate links, or like I've said earlier you shouldn't including direct affiliate links in your posts, always link to a review page that contain your affiliate links and if possible it should be from another domain or subdomain.

I hope this helps.

redensa said:

Linking to full review page with enough content is far better than adding lots of affiliate links on a page, when you search for any keyword you'll hardly find any page ranking top and filled with lots of direct affiliate links especially a popular niche.

1. repeating long tail keywords alone won't favor your rankings these days, if you want proof; type any long tail keyword of your choice in google, open the top 3 results, find out whether that long tail keyword is exactly present in those pages! I've done this multiple times and i haven't find a single page on the top three that contain the exact long tail keyword, only some variations of it. just include the long tail keyword in the title and write your content naturally.

2. If you're not ready to invest some money on backlinks, you should definitely write your content on long tail keywords.

3. Not all the content on your keyword should contain affiliate links, you should write a few information posts without affiliate links, or like I've said earlier you shouldn't including direct affiliate links in your posts, always link to a review page that contain your affiliate links and if possible it should be from another domain or subdomain.

I hope this helps.

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I don`t understand 1 and 2. In 1, you said that articles on long tail keywords doesn`t work well nowadays. In 2, you recommend writing content on long tail keywords.