Automated Article Submission: Worth Your Time (And Money)?

It sounds like an amazing concept. Think of all the time you could save by having your article submitted to hundreds of article directories, all with the push of a button. Your name and brand would be all over the internet. Your link popularity will shoot through the roof. All these things would add up to bring your site droves of traffic which would in turn cause your sales to rise. With these goals in mind I attempted some of these services, but came up short in satisfaction.

I came across a site that offered free bulk submission of my articles. They said my article would be shown in front of thousands of publishers. So I submitted my article through them. A lot of time passed, and eventually I saw my article was on a few article directories. This particular service sent my article to several Yahoo newsgroups for articles, which isn't a bad thing, but I have my doubts if even a single publisher picked up my article in those groups. My article was published on a few article directories, but not as much as I was hoping for. The particular service I used offered an upgrade for a fee but I decided it wasn't worth my money.

Sometime later I found yet another form of automated article submission; this time in the form of free software. I looked over the forms in the software. It turns out that even though it will submit your article to a plethora of directories "automatically", you still have to register for those directories, and then input your login information in the software. I found the personal information forms too limiting. I also checked the article directories were pre-built into the software. Some did not even exist anymore. Some were niche article directories, and if you didn't write articles in that niche then they were of no use to you. The vast majority of them were in my opinion not high quality directories. A lot of them were based on some stock script. In the end I never bothered to use the software. Good thing it was free.

The final straw for me was this one other site which seemed a lot more promising to me. The fields where you inputted your information were more generalized, since different article directories all have different requirements of information. Long story short, after using their service to submit my articles, I have my doubts that a single one of those directories ever published any of my articles. I searched for my articles on many of those directories and found no trace of them. I checked the newsgroups that the service submitted to, and found nothing. Maybe one or two eventually published some of my articles, but by then I'd had enough.

I learned a lot through these series of mishaps and debacles. One thing I eventually learned was that article directories have been starting to reject automated submissions, probably to prevent spamming. Also from experience, I've learned that every article directory is different. Their submission fields could vary drastically. Some require a preview to your article, some do not. Some have an extra space for your resource box, others do not and you have to include your resource box in the article body. Their rules also vary. For example, some allow you to have anchor text in your links for your resource box, and others do not. Some do not allow you to have any HTML coding whatsoever.

Now I'm not knocking automated article submission. There are probably good amounts of services/software out there that will submit your article to a ton of high quality directories, newsgroups, and ezines. However I think the good ones will actually cost money, and I'm simply too cheap to pay to promote my articles.

Maybe it takes more time and work, but I think I'll just stick to submitting my articles manually.