for the last few months i submit unique articles to about 20 direcotries every week manually and it is not working. i guess this method of building links is a waste of time becuase it takes lots of time to write them and they dont bring results.
I definitely think the old style of just submitting tons of articles to EZA isn't as effective as it used to be. Instead (as mentioned above) try guest blogging or finding alternatives to EZA/articlesbase/etc.
RitePad allows you to post links in the body of the article, so they might help your rankings. In addition to that, you get 80% of the Adsense impressions on your content.
it still works but after Google Panda update, you just dont get as much backlinks as you did before due to duplicate content issue. however, if you can use this method wisely, it still can do wonder.