I am quite dismissive about article marketing. It has taken a backseat post the panda update. What’s the point of submitting a single article to many directories when Google is going to rank one and discard rest as duplicate.
Why don’t you hear it from Matt Cutts himself as to why Google is leaning away from article marketing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY
I would suggest you other facets of article marketing namely blogging, guest blogging, blog commenting, social bookmarking etc..Guest blogging works for me. With keyword country as my partner, I am able to find niche related blogs easily to comment on.