I don't have a whole lot of experience with this, but I used to post articles to ezinearticles. They resulted in some traffic, and I'm talking like back in 2003. My account is still up there, and I had it reauthorized so I could post some more on there to see how well it works. The main issue is that each article is reviewed, and it can take a few days before the article goes live. Mine just got kicked back to me today for some minor thing they wanted me to fix. Fixed it and resubmitted it. Will let you know if it garners any traffic.
Back in 2003, there were a number of article directories, and I found out by doing a google search back then that a ton of sites had used my articles in their sites. This created some traffic thanks to the link in the resource area. Whether or not it had any google "juice" because of backlinking, I don't know. At that point in time it raised my PR a couple of points, but this was so long ago and google has changed their algorithm more than their CEO has gone to toilet, so who knows.