Mass or Selective Article Submission?

That is indeed a good question. And the answer is it depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your Article Marketing.

Mass submittal will get you a lot of backlinks to wherever you are pointing them in your resource box.

BUT: The backlinks can and will come from many places that you have no control over.

Such as unrelated websites, and or websites with zero Page Rank.
Traffic is traffic maybe but the afore mentioned will only serve to lower the page rank of your site if that is in the resource box.

In this case it is better to use selective submittal to 6 or 8 high Page Rank directories. You can even rewrite the articles enough to make them unique as well as alter the titles.

What about affiliate sales? Mass submit. You don't need Page Rank really. Although it wouldn't hurt in the long run.

A good way to go about this is to put up a small inexpensive website just for this one product. Put (5) or so articles on it related to the affiliate product. Point your resource or "bio" box links at this website. Where your affiliate product is featured.

This of course would hold true of your autoresponder opt-in page for list building. With a lot of articles out there does it really need to worry about Page Rank or duplicate content? They see and read your article and for more information or a freebie they come to the opt-in page to subscribe.

And as for duplicate content don't let the "Guru Crud" scare you into buying their product. Unless you put the same thing on the same website it really isn't that big an issue; yet. But try to be original as a standing habit. The search engines are getting smarter all the time.