This question is a very common one but it is hard to answer.  Why?  Because there is no way to track if you are gaining extra views from you work of promoting your articles or not.  For now, I do not do any promotion on my articles and my earnings seem to be fine.  Some people feel that it is absolutely necessary to promote your articles.  I’m not quite sold on this and here is why.

Ehow is already a popular website that has thousands of backlinks.  Ehow articles rank really well in Google.  If you write an article, within 20 minutes you can usually find it on Google.  Good luck trying to get those results with your own website.

The main purpose of promoting articles is to generate traffic to your articles.  This isn’t a bad idea because the more traffic to your article the better chance you have to earn money on it.  However, this is not always true.  Some of my highest earning articles have less than 500 views.  I have some that have over 1,000 views but have not earned as much as an article that has only 100 views.

If you have spare time I would advise you to do a little promotion of your articles.  It won’t hurt.  However, in the beginning I would suggest writing more articles before you spend any time on promoting your articles.