Article submitting - Still effective?

Yes article marketing is still effective. It builds quality backlinks and along with that will create traffic to your sites and build your image and name up to.

1. Yes. Mostly, the backlinks are the main benefit, though articles sometimes generate clicks to your site as well.
2. There are so many free quality article sites that I don't bother with paid sites.
3. Volume depends on so many factors. The biggest consideration for me is the age of my site. I submit fewer articles that point to my new sites. Older, established sites, I sometimes allow 30, 40 or sometimes more articles to be submitted that point to my older sites. In essence, age of site and objective (i.e. am i trying to rise in the serps, am i just bulking up the backlinks so i don't fall in the serps, am i trying to boost traffic, etc, etc) will determine how much. Volume is more of an art, not science, and it varies significantly with each site.
4. I use paid services to submit articles, and in turn, these services push the articles out to many recipients; thus, my one submission can turn into multiple submissions, and I don't have to do anything else. With each paid service you do need to prep your article so that it can be submitted in non-duplicate fashion. The prep work varies; for example, you may need to rewrite each sentence of your article a few times, or you may need to alter your article so that it is in spin format, etc.
Hope these answers help.

Article marketing is one of the powerful and effective one still which drives a lot of traffic to our sites and can gain quality backlinks. I submit my articles through " Articlepool " which is a paid one.

The last article submitted to my article directory has had 100 views. I approved it just a few hours ago!

I see the article title showing in G SERP's.

I would say that article marketing still works.

Article Marketing is still THE most effective for me! Especially in affiliate marketing.

I mean, it can beat websites (because of the PR, link power through RSS ,backlinks etc of directories) anyday even and don't cost anything (even an EZA basic account will do.)

i submit 4 a day. And use the major directories already mentioned here: These days article base is ranking REALLY well.

But of course, for backlink building there MAY be other methods that are more effective, but articles are still safe and reliable.

I'm a little late to the article marketing party, but I've found that the backlinks help with rankings and last. Although I've only dabbled so far I'm happy with the results and intend to implement dave147's technique myself.

In addition to being effective it also makes me feel like a little less of a bottom feeder than blog commenting, plus it allows me to flex my writing muscles and generate content for my main site(s) at the same time!

Yes I would say article marketing works for building backlinks. I also use the ezine tactics I learned from a WSO awhile back from Jeremy Kelsall and that works like crazy.

Here is a good list of the top article directories to submit to:

SEO News - My Collection of 23 best Article Directories