I once paid a guy to write articles and submit them to these article sites. There were a few visitors coming from those sites at the beginning, but it didn't help much. (This has also been 2 years ago, things might have changed)

It sounds a bit like a plans sold by get rich quick sites. Instead, spend time improving your site.

This helps with inbound links and PageRank as well as some visitors.

These are things we all "know" but never quite put together as a system. I just came upon this system myself and I have started implementing it, I am not much of a writer and so I had two articles written for me. I just started on this myself so I have not gone all the way from step 1 to 7 but when I do I will compile the results and post them.