Article marketing can be very effective still. But it all depends on how you do it. Good old friend Matt Cutts has said that links in resource boxes are not really what they look for as being quality natural backlinks.
The links below an article as resource box. That won’t work well anymore. Matt said it.
Personally, I see quite a lot of good results because of ‘article marketing’…
What does work? To me it has proven that Natural embedded text links DO work.
They (Google) assume, if you have great content on your site, other webmasters will link to is. This is what they consider a real and natural build quality link.
Therefor: Embed links inside of articles is what DOES work.
Unfortunately, most article directories do not allow you to do this. And, most are not quality sites. So, what’s the reason to do it.
Then there is the average ‘quality’ coming with the article directories lately. It takes a lot of effort to find the good ones. Near impossible lately since Google’s crackdown on them.
For this formula to do wonders: You need access to lots of high quality sites, tons of quality content and a few links embedded in that content. Not below it.
Quality content, posted pure whitehat. This way, you tell Google bot, there are many people posting quality content to their sites, and they all link to you! A bot is a bot. Tell it what it wants to hear.
But, above all: quality is what becomes best quantity!