As a general rule, article writers should not expect instant avalanches of traffic to their newly published article, even if it has been published on one of the more prominent article directories. There are of course some very few exceptions to this rule. According to the home page of GoArticles.com, their most viewed article has currently received The Four Percent over 23,000 views which is an amazing result. More likely, however, is that a well written article will receive somewhere between 5-10 visitors per day. While this may seem like a very poor result for the time invested into writing a full article, one should remember that this number will accumulate and may result in a couple of hundred unique visitors on a monthly basis, which is not bad for one single article. Also, these visitors are most likely highly targeted, which also increases the true value of these visitors. As any internet marketer knows, it is usually better to have 100 highly targeted visitors than 1,000 non-targeted.
Gaining quick traffic is in fact not the main reason why internet marketers submit articles to article directories - it is the linking opportunities. When articles are published in the top article directories, they are almost instantly crawled and indexed by Google and other major search engines. This means that marketers will get a link back to their website very fast. By submitting their articles to several article directories, well, then the number of quality links that point to their website will increase. The number of relevant and quality links a particular website has is one of the parameters that search engines take into consideration when ranking websites in their search results. So this is very important indeed.