What to Do with 300-400 articles?

Ok folks - I need your wisdom.

I just came across a stockpile of roughly 300-400 articles I forgot I had. The articles are in the same (or related) niche as my website. (I have my own site that I sell my own products from, though I also affiliate market complimentary products to my list.)

My main goal is to get my site ranking well for my intended KWs. I read all this junk about people getting traffic from EZA, other articles directories, web 2.0 sites, etc., but I just wonder. First of all, I've spent a little time submitting articles to EZA and articles directories (not that many...maybe only 35-40...but still enough IMO to get an idea) and have gotten pretty much nada as far as direct traffic (and viewing my EZA stats, the articles don't get that much play outside of the first couple days they're published anyway...).

Besides, call me crazy, but when I do google searches for the random subject (not marketing/business related), I don't EVER find myself on any of these kinds of sites. Maybe blogs, but that's about it. I've never been directed to squidoo, hubpages, EZA, etc. And if I do see those results in google (which is still doesn't seem to happen all the time), I usually don't click on them. Maybe I'm in the minority. Who knows.

Either way, what I'm trying to get at is that I could care less if all these articles themselves rank worth a darn in the search engines. I just want to best utilize them for backlinks to my site so that I can increase my own site's ranking.

If you had these articles, what would you folks do? Submit them to articles directories (provided that the links in the resource box are dofollow...which I see articlesbase is not...so now I'm checking the other directories I've posted to as well)? Blogs (and if so, does it matter which platform - WP vs blogger vs the other 9 zillion out there)? Web 2.0 sites (and if so, which ones - I recently read a thing that hubpages won't give you dofollow unless you get a rank of XX...whatever that means)?

If I don't care about the pages themselves ranking, is it worth my time (since I'll likely be doing a lot of this myself at the outset) to build link wheels?

Am I an idiot for not wanting them to rank themselves (though I've honestly not scanned them close enough to even see if any could be used for longtail KWs...the 'main' KWs they center around are so broad these things will ever rank w/o a ton of work)?

Another idea I had was to (in addition to anything else I do) dump them all on my own site, and social bookmark them all to get additional links to my site...get people there, they start digging around my site, etc.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.