Hello. Have I got this right re Article Marketing?

Yes, it makes sense.

And yes, if you choose your keywords correctly you will rank higher than the sites you're promoting products for.

That's because your article will be optimized even better than that site for the longtail keyword you're targeting.

If the site is new, then it is more than likely the article will rank higher than the site.

Yes especially if like Mike said the site is new and the article site you post too is well credentialed.
However continual article marketing is what will get your site recognized and higher up the rankings too...so it is not a one off process.

It doesn't take long if you are consistent as in 4 weeks since launching new site have found 60% of traffic comes organically so just keep at it with good content and you will get there

Good Luck

Yes; like the others have said, you can usually rank higher with an article than with your own site, especially if it's new. That's because you are taking advantage of the Page Rank and the thousands of backlinks the article directory has to push your own article to the top.

I don't recommend writing hundreds of articles. I recommend writing some top quality articles, putting them on a High PR article directory, and then doing a backlink campaign to the articles themselves. This will get your articles a high position in Google and will bring a lot of traffic your way.

In nearly every case your submitted articles will always rank higher then your actual website. However, I have seen some exceptions to this where a site was so properly optimized for a specific keyword phrase that the site ranked higher then every article that was submitted on its behalf.

In this case the site was built around keyword phrase that started with "How To Prevent (niche topic)" What I mean is that was what the actual domain name was for the website which gave it a huge advantge for that keyword phrase in the search engines.

As Angela has pointed out, you can propel your submitted articles to an even higher ranking in the search engines by linking to them from high authority sites.

Respectfully,
Tim

I just want to add another layer of thinking on this topic. The others who have commented are 100% correct, but it leads to the next step in the traffic process...

Links to articles >> links FROM articles to your site

Two things to keep in mind here. First, make sure you have a link or two in the author box at the end of every article you submit to a directory. And be sure to use anchor text (the clickable part of the link) that is keyword based. For example, if you want to rank well for "dog training" then make those two words the text people click on to go to your site from the article. For the second link, use a variation of that phrase, like "how to train a dog." This will help your site rank for both phrases.

Second, when you get links to the article itself, also use the 2 main keywords you've used in your author box. In this example, get links to the article that use "dog training" and "how to train a dog" as the anchor text. This way, the article develops a better chance for ranking in the search engines for those phrases, and then the article itself passes on some link power by using outbound links to your site. You win both ways.

Finally, don't lose sight of the visitors your site will get from the article itself. You need to really come up with a good author box. You want to give your readers a strong call to action (telling the reader to go to your site), a reason to go to your site, and a bit of mystery never hurts. In other words, don't give away so much in your article that you lessen the desire in your reader to get more from your site.

John