Because there are so many article directories, a number of people have created ways to automate the process of article submission.

You can get software to do the job. A great example is Brad Callen's 'Article Submitter'.

Or you can use an article submission service.

Traditional Article Marketing Services
Article Marketer

Article Marketer is a popular article submission service. Cost is $79.99 per quarter.

iSnare

iSnare is another popular article submission service. Charges are from $2.00 per article, with discounts for quantity. A Platinum membership allows you to distribute 300 articles a month for $59.95 recurring.

When a visitor types in a search term, the search engines all strive to return the most relevant results. They do not want to present the visitor (their customer) with a list of 20 or 100 or 1000 identical results for a search. That could result in the customer trying someone else's search engine.

For this reason, the search engines have created ways to discover duplicate content. There is still some debate about how unique your website content needs to be. You can be sure that completely unique articles are the best.

There are a couple of article submission services that allow you to create 'unique' articles by using simple word and phrase replacement techniques. I'm not talking about automated replacement, where the software automatically replaces words with synonyms from a dictionary. There are systems which can do a good job of this, but they tend to need a lot of setup work.

I'm talking about systems where the author has precise control over the words, phrases and even sentences which are replaced. It's quite possible to write two sentences which have similar meanings, using different words. For instance,

'The author controls the words and phrases which are to be replaced.'

could be replaced with

'The writer is able to control the substitution of sentences, phrases and words.'

without anyone being the wiser.

The way in which this is done is usually by introducing a simple syntax, such as:

The {author|writer} {controls|is able to control} the {words and phrases which are to be replaced|substitution of sentences, phrases and words}.

The sentence above would be able to generate 6 sentences, including the two examples above. Do this with every sentence and every paragraph and you would be able to create a large number of different 'spun' versions of the article.

Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions about article marketing:

Who retains the copyright?
When an article directory accepts your article for publication, you retain the copyright. However, you are effectively giving permission to other publishers to use your article, subject to the rules of the article directory.

Most article directories are quite clear about the rules for re-publishing of articles from their sites. These are usually along these lines:

1. Article must be published without alteration.
2. The author's resource box and copyright information must be included.
3. URLs in the article body and resource box must remain 'clickable'.

If you use Unique Article Wizard, you are expected to permit your material to be republished under a Creative Commons Attribution - No Derivative Works License.

If you are concerned about copyright issues, you should check on the rules for the specific submission service or article directories you plan to use.

Should I go for quality or quantity?
These are two issues here. Firstly, is it actually necessary to submit articles to hundreds or thousands of article directories or blogs, many of which could be of relatively poor quality, with low search engine rankings? And secondly, how good do the articles actually need to be?

Should you be submitting a small number of high quality articles to only the top directories, or should you be generating hundreds of articles of dubious quality and flooding the smaller directories with them?

My feeling is that a healthy balance is necessary. It's not necessary to create hundreds of articles. You might write six good-quality articles, and submit three of them directly to the top directories such as GoArticles, EzineArticles and ArticleDashboard. Then create spinnable versions of the other three articles and submit them to the smaller directories using JetSubmitter, Smocco or Unique Article Wizard.

The top article directories have quite stringent quality guidelines, and articles may be checked by human beings as well as by duplicate-detection software such as CopyScape.

Artemis Pro $105 (once off)
Artemis Pro is a stand-alone desktop software program for Windows. The program submits 'unique' articles to a (secret) internal list of website publishers and to an external list of ezine publishers. You need to supply the list of ezine publishers yourself. The articles are made unique by uploading three text files, each with a different version of the same article. The software creates new versions on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. The number of 'unique' articles depends on the number of paragraphs.

There is a free version available, called ArtemisLite. This is the same as Artemis Pro, but without the facility to submit articles to an external list.

There are some issues with both versions of Artemis, because the software sends emails directly from your desktop using your ISP's mail server. Some ISP's (probably most ISP's) don't like this. You can read more about it in this blog post by Robert Phillips.

Unique Article Marketing (Free)



Unique Article Marketing is a free script which sends unique articles to ezine publishers. It uses the {word1|word2} syntax, and is much more controllable than Artemis Pro. It is based on the Open Source phpList software, and is a pain to install. I strongly recommend that you buy the videos that Steven Lohrenz, the developer, offers. He also offers an installation service, if you don't want to waste time.

The Unique Article Marketing script is installed on your web host's server, and uses your web host's SMTP mail server to send emails. This is much better than using your ISP, but some hosts may limit the number of emails you can send per hour. phpList allows you to precisely control the number of emails it sends.

JetSpinner/JetSubmitter Free / $17/mo



Jetspinner is a free article spinning service. It is web based, and very easy to use. It uses the {word1|word2} syntax, and allows you to specify a number of spun articles to create, up to 999. You can then download the spun articles as a *.zip file.
JetSubmitter is the article submission side of the equation. It is relatively cheap, at $17 a month. It automatically signs you up for around 500 article directories, and submits articles directly from your JetSpinner account - a 'unique' article is submitted to each article directory.

Content Spooling Network $50/mo



Content Spooling Network is a powerful article submission system, which submits your articles to over 900 member sites. It also allows you to easily set up and submit to 19 of the top article sites, including EzineArticles and GoArticles. It uses the same {word1|word2} syntax as JetSpinner and Unique Article Marketing.

Unique Article Wizard $47/mo



Unique Article Wizard is a powerful article submission service which submits your articles to over 2500 article directories and blogs. The article spinning mechanism is 'secret'.

Smocco $19.95/mo



Smocco is a reasonably-priced submission service which submits articles to a network of blogs and similar content sites. Articles can be spun, using an unnecessarily-complicated variant of the {word1|word2} syntax.