Article marketing is old fashioned but still useful way of building backlinks. With the explosive popularity of social networking websites, article marketing lost appeal to many. Mainly because of the "instant result" nature of the social networking site marketing.

With lot of people misusing the social networking websites, most of the popular ones use NOFOLLOW tags on links these days.

I am sure you have heard of the story slow turtle beats the fast rabbit by hard working. This happen to be very true on website marketing as well. Most of us won't be able to make Digg front page or so to get boost of traffic. I rather find the old fashioned ways, including article marketing, more useful.