Article Marketing for SEO (Again) ?

For a few years I used article marketing networks like ArticleRanks, Article Marketing Automation, and Unique Article Wizard for most of my link building and I had pretty good success (and I manually spun my articles by hand - time consuming tedious work but it made spun articles that were not detectable as spun articles even by human readers.)

This was pretty time consuming but the links I got back were on pages with very related high quality content.

Starting last year I started outsourcing more and more of my link building either to people here on Warrior Forum or to Fiverr people or to "set it and forget it" type link building programs like LinxBoss and LinkAloha. The idea was that I would spend less time on link building and more time on building quality content on my own sites.

I've now lost a lot of the rankings that I used to have (many of them were lost when the Penguin came to town, but some before that as well.) More and more I'm thinking that all of the SEO outsourcing and "set it and forget it" and Fiverr type stuff just doesn't work. It's too easy, everyone is doing it, it creates massive loads of garbage content ...

So I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't have ever fixed what wasn't broken. Article marketing always worked for me. Meanwhile I've had pretty terrible results with outsourcing my work (including to the some of the best reviewed Warrior Forum SEO people...) and with all of the set it & forget it programs.

But .. the big question is .. does it still work? I've heard about some blog networks being deindexed (and I did use BMR too.. but it wasn't a huge part of my strategy... I hated that you had to do each post individually.)

Basically I'm looking for some input from people who are still using a strategy similar to what I used to use (relying mostly on article marketing submission services like UAW, AMA, and ArticleRanks...) ?