If writing articles is all you do, then it will probably take a very very long time. If you get your link on a few PR7 and PR8 pages, then you will see it happen much quicker. Pagerank is all about quality of links, not quantity. -- Phil
If you write only articles, you can achieve PR-7 within 7 years. Please concentrate on other SEO techniques including directory submission, press release, article submission to article directories, etc.
If all you do is write articles then the answer is never. Unless you ARE wikipedia. In which case you already have a higher Pagerank. You get pagerank from backlinks. You get backlinks from people liking your site and linking to it, or more realistically, from you going out and asking people to link, and submitting to digg, relevant directories etc etc. The other issue is - why do you want PR7?
Precisely. Unless you've got someone lined up to give you a big bag of cash when you reach PR7, that's not the right goal. Your goal should be reaching certain traffic milestones and reaching a certain amount of revenue per day.
It probably won't happen unless these articles are written exclusively for publication on very large websites... i.e. article 1 gets you a link from cnet.com, article 2 gets a link from wired.com, etc If you're just putting articles on your site and doing nothing else, that will never get you a PR7.
If you are a highly respected expert in your field, and your field is a distinguished one, you could probably reach a high PR within a year.... such as if you are a world renowned professor and your articles get linked to from the top universities and research institutions around the world.
writing articles will not get you to PR7 unless you write about something that is earth shaking and no one has ever wrote before. your site has to be exceptional and you will need viral traffic to get there.
you'll never (unless for miracles) get pr7. If you want pr7 you need to buy lots of pr7 and pr8 links which is very expensive. unless you make a huge site like myspace and get free natural backlinks.
Despite what some people in this thread are telling you, yes, you can get very high quality links just from your content. I got a sitewide link on a PR7 site that was high quality and highly relevant to my niche just because they stumbled across some of my articles. They're not PR7 anymore, because they were hit hard by Google during the last PR update unfortunately (despite the fact that their links are natural and not paid for), but that's the nature of Pagerank. So the truth is that you can very definitely get high PR links just from your content. It's just going to happen much more quickly if you actively market your site (and that doesn't mean you have to buy links, submit to directories, etc... it means you need to market the site to get your content - assuming it's high quality - in front of people who can give you those natural high quality links).
I'll have to agree with some of you, good content is a must for link bait, but some marketing is needed to get the good content out to the readers.
There's more to link building than just writing millions of articles and placing them all over the shop. Be a bit creative and see how you go
Well said jhmattern! Yes you can do it with content and yes it can take time if that's all your doing. As mentioned, keep working on getting quality back links from authority sites that are relevant to your niche and keep promoting your site via social sites, press releases etc.