I'm not interested in submitting to directories anymore unless they're very good. For my art website, I'm more interested in targeted traffic and especially getting higher in the SERP's for specific keywords. I realize that the blog posts(with my link) I make are generally well liked and the owners of the blog thank me. Surely this will help spread my reach in interested people, but it's very tedious writing 50 or so blog posts a day. I guess I'm asking... will my link in the very related blog post be worth anything for SERP's? In most blogs I can't rename my anchor text but certainly all the content on that page is exactly on the topic I'm targeting.
You should try and find blogs that dont use the 'no-follow' code. However, with other popular blogs which use the 'no-follow' code can still get you some traffic, which can lead to returning visitors to your blog if they like it.