Aaron writes about a not really new concept to SEO or marketing – placing paid articles – and compares it to site-wide links… or link rentals in general…

He calls paid article placements "pre sell pages"… sounds a bit odd to me… but
instead of buying sitewide links it is better to buy an advertising pages hosted on other sites. Link to that page from many pages on that same site (which in a sense is like pointing a sitewide link on that site at that advertising page). Link popularity flows more naturally within a domain than it does across domains.

Write the article page using appropriate page title, header, and subheaders. From the article page deep link to various locations on your site with descriptive anchor text.

If you make the article page well and the site you are advertising on is strong enough it gives you another opportunity to rank well. In fact, if your market is exceptionally competitive the authority of the site you are advertising on may allow that page to rank even if your site is not strong enough to rank.

In my opinion this option is way better than any single text link… no question can you position your products better via relevant descriptions around your link than a single text link… to both – search engines working more semantic than a few months or years before… and most important: to your humans! your customers… those that you REALLY want to address..

more thoughts on this at the seoblog's article