How do I drive traffic to articles?

Exactly.

Yes, certainly, but not pointing to the copy of the article that's in a directory - to the one on your own site!

Why give EZA all those links and all that traffic? I'd strongly recommend not doing that at all. I used to do it at one time but have now learned better (and am making a very good living through article marketing, having learned better), and I now increase the ranking of the copies of those articles on my own sites instead. Yes, they're on EZA too, and I get all the benefits of that - but it's my own site I want to rank highly, not their own site.

Not because it's "unnecessary" to boost their site on Google, but because in spite of the potential shorter-term traffic gain, it can really limit and possibly even damage your business in the longer term.

What you're asking about in this thread, Bloomingrose, is really a way of generating traffic from backlinking work (or however else) and sending it to someone else's site. I want to develop my sites, not other people's.

It's easy to imagine, if you build backlinks to copies of your articles at Ezine Articles, for instance, that you're "getting a lot of traffic from EZA". But in the long run, you're really not: what you're actually doing is sending a lot of traffic there, which you could have sent to your own site instead, and getting only some of it back - losing a good proportion of it to EZA's AdSense (which is of course how they make a living and what they're there for).

It's really about "how you use article directories". You might be well advised make sure you use to them to get traffic to your site from them, and not to send traffic that you yourself are generating with your backlinking efforts to them. In the long run, every backlink you create to an article directory actually makes it potentially harder and less likely for your own site to be built up into an authority site, because you'll gradually be ensuring that article directories (who may have some "SEO start" over your site anyway?) will always outrank your own site for your own keywords.

It's one of those questions in internet marketing (there are others!) about which, if you ask two different groups of people, namely "people trying article marketing" and "people making a good living from article marketing", you'll typically find two very different consensuses of opinion. In other words, some people may disagree with what I'm saying here - but do bear in mind that in a field of endeavour with quite a high fail-rate, sometimes the "consensus view" may not be too reliable, and they might mostly be the ones not earning so much. Just my opinion.

There is a short-term benefit to doing what you're asking about, of course, which is why it leads so many people astray. The further you fall into the trap of that short-term benefit (and it really is a trap!), the more you potentially damage your own site's long-term, future SEO prospects. And you end up with one of those "rinse and repeat" businesses instead of one based on gradually increasing residual income.

When you have time for a long, informative, educational read, Bloomingrose, you'll also find a lot of the incidental conversation in this fine thread very helpful. Good luck!

If you want more traffic to the article, it should have latest information and it should be fresh content not copied from others

Article Directories do not drive that much traffic to sites on the average. Some unique and informative articles can do this with a very good "call to action" and a link to your site, but generally articles do not drive the most traffic. They are most often best for linking and exposure (establishing yourself as an expert and getting your name known within a particular niche).

Articles can, and do, create some traffic, even for the authors that are not that great at creating original work, but never rely on article directories for the majority of your traffic generation.

Try them out, and then check your analytics, and see if, and how much of, your traffic is coming from your published articles. If you are receiving good traffic from certain articles then focus on them and duplicate the format that you used on your next article. Something you did was right, and you might be able to transfer the successful technique and format to all of your future articles.

You can drive traffic to articles by placing a link on forums, blogs, and social media sites. This is a technique that is used by many good marketers that can be beneficial because it is an indirect way of getting links and traffic, rather than linking directly to your own website. The drawback to this is that the average Internet Surfer only spends 90 seconds on one article or post. So, unless the article is very captivating and very informative for the reader, it is unlikely that they will follow your link to read more about the subject.

It never hurts to try.

Here is a list of the top 100 article directories by Alexa rank (which is by traffic rank).
Top Article Directories by Alexa Rank with Google PageRank | Raief