Article marketing is a good way to promote your website... but it is just one promotion technique out of many. Good written articles that you submit to directories will be picked up by different e-zine owners and website owners. They publish your article on their website or in their e-zine with your "About the author" box.
That will result in direct traffic through these websites and e-zines as well as traffic directly from the article directories. These articles will also help you to increase your pagerank and therefore your search engine position.
You'll need to reach a certain mass of articles before you see real results... submitting 10 articles won't do much. Many directories rank the articles according to how many articles an author has in a certain category.
Guido