It's rather easy to do, and several approaches.
1) if you assign the class like "newlinkstyle" to the link you are styling, then in skin.css you enter:
a.newlinkstyle:link, a.newlinkstyle:visited, a.newlinkstyle:active { your styles here for color }
a.newlinkstyle:hover { your hover colors here }
2) With the container method, you can assign different colored text for anything you want. In your containers have a "wrapper" class that contains the container html. Then in container.css you can do the following. If your "wrapper" class is actually called "containerwrapper1":
.containerwrapper1 a:link, a:visited, a:active { specific colors to assign any container with that wrapper class }
So, you can assign different wrapper classes to different containers and have entirely different styles for everything from headers, subheads, normaltext, etc.
It's all about following the cascade of the stylesheets and the styles themselves. You might also want to look at "Firebug" free extension for FireFox. I use that exclusively when developing a skin to be able to "inspect" elements and the heirarchy of classes assigned to them. Firebug is invaluable must have tool for help with assigning and styling classes in DNN skins.
Hope that helps,
Rick