By writing articles for high quality sites you get high TrustRank links cheaper than you can rent or buy them, many secondary links, and added credibility (I think Andy Hagans may have been asked to speak at a cool conference largely based on a recent article).

As an added bonus, when search engines place more bias on global popularity scores your article can show up for rather competitive terms if your site for some reason drops out of the results.

I was just looking through Google's [search engine optimization], and after SeoBook.com has been around for close to two years it ranks at ~ 30 in Google, and Andy Hagans recent article on A List Apart ranks at #19.

In my interview of NFFC he stated:

we offer marketing on demand, a webmaster needs to be visible in every channel.

Sometimes that means working hard to make your site fit a variety of algorithmic possibilities, and sometimes that means putting backup on other sites.