Articles can collect traffic, but depends on the places where it is posted. Article directories might not be effective in bringing visitors, but surely if an article is posted on popular information sites like SEOCHAT, SEOMOZ, and more (example for SEO domain), quality traffic can be expected.
Absolutely, article marketing is a great way to pull traffic to your site. I have a few articles that I submitted to Ezine Articles over a year ago, and to this day, I still get consistent monthly traffic from those articles!
A really good thing with Article Marketing is that if done correctly, optimized for keywords, it will be on the search engines for years to come creating new traffic.
I feel article marketing is good thing to get name as writer but not very good thing for getting traffic. At least my personal experience in this regard is very bad.
I, personally, use "The Best Spinner" to create unique articles. It does, however, require an investment of $77/year - well worth it if you're truly serious about pursuing article marketing in a big way. Best, --JR
I have yet to get SERIOUS with Article Marketing It is a very RELIABLE and TIME TESTED method of getting hot leads and the best thing is, unlike forum marketing, it matures with time and the traffic has a potential to increase dramatically as more and more people pass it on, post it on their blogs/websites and talk about it. Coming back to your question, I believe EVERYONE will agree that Article Marketing is in fact the best method to get both TRAFFIC and BACK LINKS which will propogate the sites' ranking with time.
You can pull in good (free! the best kind) traffic through articles. The key is to do it on a consistent basis; write 3-5 articles a day and submit to at least 20 directories (both of which can be outsourced). I spin my articles to a certain extent, but I don't use software to do it.