Articles can get you alot of traffic from search engines, get you backlinks from sites that use your articles for content on their site, they can help build your optin lists and obviously sell whatever it is you are promoting.

1. Know Your Audience – The most successful way to use affiliate programs is to anticipate and meet the needs of your readers. Consider why they are reading the article. Make sure you are promoting a solution to your audience’s problems.
2. Have an attention grabbing title – The title needs to interesting enough to get people to read further but it also needs to contain the keywords you are targeting.
3. Content is your foundation – It is the life blood on which the site exists. Focus on providing excellent content by making it relevant for your audience
4. No less than 500 words – Make your article at 500 words long to ensure your reader has enough content and information to feel they have read a valuable article
5. What about you? – Save this for the end of your article.   You can promote your website, you only have 4 or 5 lines of text to do this in so make it appealing, offer some freebie or limited offer etc.

Remember, once you have spent your time creating a great article, make sure you maximise the opportunity to convert your reader into a lead by posting the article on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, your website, ensuring the content tailored to make it relevant for your reader.