Article submission - people always ask if they are really useful in article marketing. To paraphrase that, what online marketers really want to know is whether there truly are merits in using them to submit articles. The truth is there are two schools of thinking about using article submission software. As usual, there are those who do not believe it works while another group can vouch to its effectiveness. Why dont we have a quick look at the workings of the article submission software before we decide if we should submit articles with them?

Article submission software in recent years have been emerging as a tool to replace manual submission. When I first started online marketing, I wrote articles and submit manually to these article directories like GoArticles, HotLib and a few other popular article directories. It often takes me more than a few hours to submit to more than a dozen article directories. There was the log in, followed by sieving through the article submission form, copying and pasting my article title, article body, article summary, relevant keywords and author resource boxes. Every article directory has a different interface, and very often I have to customize and twitch a little bit here and there. Trust me and those who have experienced all these, it is a tough job and sweat. Okay, so here I have an article ready to be published after one days hard work including the writing. This is manual article submission done all without article submission software.

That was a typical scenario most early day article marketers and authors have to face just a couple of years back. Today, the landscape has changed with the emergence of article submission software. The great thing about the functions of article submission software is it makes the log in and article formatting for each individual article directory so fast and so easy. Some article submission software are semi-automatic which requires you to click from one article directory to another to post. Others which are more advanced requires just the click of a button and off it goes to different article directories to post. In terms of speed and efficiency, such article submission software definitely makes the submission a breeze. As a result, we have more time to write quality articles.

If we can stick to writing an article and posting it to 100 article directories a day manually without article submissions software, we can really gain a great deal of exposure for our websites be it a business or hobby site. With so many submissions, we are putting our content before hundreds to thousands of eyeballs everyday. But the problem is we only have 24 hours and taking away time for sleep, meals and breaks, there are only a few hours to do that. We are limited in our time. With article submission software, it allows people to write more and post more each day. Instead of one article to 100 directories manually, we are talking about potentially, several articles to few 100s of article directories.

There is another twist to using article submission software. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN are constantly ranking websites or for accuracy purpose, web pages according to link popularity. Article directories are high Page Rank sites and links from these directories count as powerful one-way links. So how do we get these article directories to link to our websites? The answer is to submit articles! Articles are contextual content relevant to our websites and links from these articles to our websites are valuable because of the anchor text keywords we are targeting to rank high in the search engines. Article submission software can submit to many article directories and in just a few days, the number of high PR links to your site would increase.

There are alternatives to using article submission software such as using article submission services like Article Marketer, iSnare and others to submit articles. But they charge you either monthly or for per article submitted. Unless you have a huge advertising budget or enough money to pour into these services, buying an article submission software would be a wiser choice since the payment is one-time. Typically, quality article submission software would cost around $99 onwards.

From the look of it, it does make sense to submit articles with article submission software. Many article marketers including myself have reaped in thousands of dollars from sales by using such software. Read a review of several popular article submission software marketers have in their marketing arsenal.