Article marketing can help your website to has more backlinks and more backlinks is equal being in higher position of search engines ans then you have more traffic. Also article directories can drive some direct traffic for your website. The only thing you should do is to write unique articles and submit it to article directories. Also if you want to do it better, submit those articles in social bookmarks too.
I am fairly new to all of this as well, but in my experience article marketing is one of the best online marketing techniques around. You are building back links, which should help SEO, and you are hopefully providing interesting information for people to read which will provide actual visitors to your site. I actually purchased an article directory, BlogBlizard.com, which is a PR3, 130,000 +/- alexa rank. Our guidelines are relaxed and we are accepting pretty much everything but trash. And growing fairly quickly I might add. Keep us in mind the next time you are publishing to article directories. P.S. I would really like some feedback and suggestions on how to improve the site. Feel free to PM me.