Bum Marketing - Effective And Accurate? Or Just More Affiliate Hype?

Bum Marketing, I know about this and although I haven't joined or subscribed or what have you. I understand the theory behind it.

If you haven't heard of bum marketing, it is essentially, writing articles about a niche and submitting each one to as many article directories as possible.

Now there are some caveats as well. Each article has to be unique, as article directories will punish those who try and to submit identical articles (and so will the Search Engines).

Effectively, the other advantage is that the search engines will pick up on the key words in your headers of your articles as well as the keywords within. So your articles will become available to appear in the search engines and the theory is, also gain traffic and backlinks. Why additional backlinks? Almost all article sites allow you to have 'dofollow' attributes in your bio section on your Authors section in each article directory.

So, again, like Keywords, something else I will need to spend time on to discover if this also helps the hub gain traffic. Since I write articles often and in many places, this should not be too much of a hassle, anyway.