Everything you've mentioned and done will help your site ranking and traffic, it just takes time. Above all when building links, think of the quality of backlinks. RSS been helpful around but also strive for SE ranking for it is good source of high quality visitors.
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Both the RSS feed and article submission have their part on increasing backlinks. If you have good contents, the best conversion to it is to have good serp rankings.
The article submission most probably, it's just that you haven't seen any improvement in your rankings right away because article submission needed to be approved first by the administrator before it gets published.
Approval of articles depends on the availability of moderator. Sometimes they approved it by weekly/monthly or ever over a month. A good option would be is to do Social Bookmarking and submit your URL wherein your article is posted on your site.
RSS Feed may work but main aim of that is to provide feasibility to reader to read your content on their own reader. It is good for syndication purpose. For SEO, permanent links works better.
