Submit each article to around 5 or 6 sites, the best ones only.
Ezinearticles
Articlesbase
Goarticles
Etc
You'll find that the engines will stop indexing after around 5 or 6 copies appear. If you can get 5 or 6 links versus 1 then why wouldn't you that? No reason not to.
The problem you'll have is that the better article sites check for dup content, so might ask you to edit and resubmit.
As per the comments above a good article spinner can speed up this process. The Best Spinner is probably the best one on the market.
You can also create Web 2.0 sites on Wordpress, Blogger, Gather, Squidoo, etc for more or less the same purpose. Far better to set up blogs on these sites and submit there rather than the lower quality article directories.
Can be time consuming though and difficult to get everything indexed. Once you've submitted everything getting it all indexed (and counting for something) is the important thing