You can submit your articles for free and they may contain backlinks in the articles as well as in your author bio that is shown at the end of each article.
Let me know if you have any issues getting started.
Google picks up these pages quickly and I already have over 500 pages indexed.
Just a couple of questions – when I go to submit the article is it clearly explained how to embed links in the article and also is there a faciity to submit articles to Digg etc?