I'd never had much luck with article submission before last year, since I'd been doing it wrong - one article, multiple submissions, links in text, that sort of thing. That used to work, ten years ago, but it doesn't any more, it seems!
But last year, the guy I was partnered with in a business venture took on the article marketing side and I saw some surprising results. The thing that was most shocking was the HUGE traffic generation, relative to other methods - I'm used to the standard click-through rates on ads, the ROI on paying for CPM and all that sort of thing, but article marketing caused a noticeable traffic bump every single time.
Bear in mind that this was proper article marketing. I'm not talking about spamming a crappy marketing piece all over as many directories as possible and hoping the low-quality links generate some interest or SERP-juice. I'm talking about single guest posts on high-profile sites, and very high quality content that is useful and interesting.
Of course, the effort required is significant compared to many other methods. I can throw together an ad and chuck it on AdWords or a CPM network in half an hour, but a good guest post took him over an hour to write (possibly more), then took me another 30 minutes to edit to the required quality level. The ROI was impressive, though - and that was true even when he wrote articles which had nothing to do with our site! The best example of that was a good political piece he wrote for one of his home country's biggest blogs - a link in his byline to our site (which has nothing at all to do with politics), and there was traffic aplenty.
Definitely recommended, but avoid the generic spam version. Write something really good, get it checked by a pro, then market it out to a high-profile site and get them to give you a link in your byline. You may be surprised at the results.
