You may also find it beneficial to pay people on outsourcing sites such as Freelancer, Odesk, and Fiverr to write articles for you, sign up to different forums with your website's link in their signatures, or cultivate backlinks for you manually by any other means, such as the article marketing you suggested. While it may or may not be ethical, it gets you good results very quickly if you are a little stringent with the requirements of your freelancers. For instance, you can specify that you would like to see a certain amount of substance in their posts and the like, or request a specific description to go along with a signature link. I would also give your post a little test at the end to see which freelancers who opted in actually read your requirements to begin with. This has saved me much time in weeding out sub-par, lazy, spammy people from the adequate candidates.
I believe there is also article submission software out there, but I have yet to see a good one that is not laced with wannabe guru presells.