I like the advice (find out what your audience is searching for and write that content), though I'm not a big fan of building a ton of throwaway content ala Demand Media. That aside, it sounds like your teacher connection is working really well! What type of advice would you give a business with a less niche focus to try and find good keywords to write for? For example, my salon is called "Bloom Beauty Lounge" and th…
Ask your customers what they don't know about hair. What concerns them about their hair? What concerns them about their children's hair?
Write down exactly the words they use. Answer their questions. You'll probably notice patterns: How do I X for a person with Y hair? With a few exemplars of X and Y you can start doing multiplicative idea generation. (10 values for X and 10 values for Y = 100 articles. Get cranking. Better yet, write up outlines and get the freelancers cranking. Note that if Y is irrelevant for some value of X, and the process is actually the same regardless, your customers do not necessarily know that and they'll include Y in the query anyway.)
You'd also want to get some links to have trust to rank for non-branded pages. There is a newspaper in New York City which you might have heard of. They have an ongoing interest in racial/gender equity and many other things of concern to upper East Side liberals. "Hair is a race issue" is the sort of just-counterintuitive-enough-to-be-novel-but-nonthreatening that their editors eat with a freaking spoon. You can plumb that for many, many ideas. cough What White Moms Don't Know About Their Black Kids' Hair cough (If only there were a prominent US politician who was black, raised by a white woman, and beloved inside the newsroom -- the editors would fight over themselves about what got to cover the article.)
Does that get you started?