My Home Biz Journal

I have written my first article and wanted to submit it. Should I do it manually or use an article submitter software. I consulted the past posts at the Warrior Forum inside and got suggestions of both. So I wanted to try both methods.

1)The Manual Approach
I needed to get a list of sites to submit to first. I got this information from Stone's 30 Days to Success guide. However, I knew I could probably handle a few submissions only; so I should really submit to the better sites. How do I know which sites are good? I searched on Google for high PR sites and found http://www.smartpagerank.com/. They assign a cash value to the composite of traffic, years in business, etc. to each site. After tediously plugged in quite a few sites on the list, the winners emerged:

1-http://www.addme.com/ - $2,100,322
2-http://www.findarticles.com/ - $2,083,314
3-http://www.ezinearticles.com/ - $471,878
4-http://www.webpronews.com/ - $361,405
5-http://www.isnare.com/ - $359,533
6-http://www.articlesfactory.com/- -$248,853
7-http://www.submityourarticle.com/ - $181,254
8-http://www.goarticles.com/ - $157,413
9-http://www.warriorforum.com/ - $103,852
10-http://www.mainstreetmom.com/ - $67,960
11-http://www.ideamarketers.com/ - $58,018

Numbers 1 and 2 do not seem to invite article submission on their sites. No. 4 seems very newsy. I managed to submit to Nos. 3 and 5. Ezinearticles is very strict with affiliate links; they don't allow any, even if I mask it with an html file. So I couldn't really promote Stone's sales page. I put it in for Isnare, though. I will wait for a few days to see if they post my article. It didn't take too long. But setting up an account with each directory, putting in a summary, providing a resouce box, more editing just before the submission took quite some time. I wanted to submit to the rest of the sites as well but ran out of time.

2) The Software Approach
I looked online for a freeware. It wasn't a smooth experience.

The first one I downloaded had over 200 directories to submit to. Only a small portion of the directories inbuilt had a PR of 6. Everything else was below it. Right away, I wasn't too impressed. The software design was not intuitive. What made me lose hope on it was that I couldn't change my password after I had already created an author account. I decided to delete the whole thing.

My second try was actually a trick played on whoever downloads it. It was an animated book opening telling you that this was not what you would expect, but if you still wanted it, you had to go to a certain site to purchase it. This turned me off right away. It was a bad marketing decision.

My third try was Artemis Lite. I remembered reading good comments about it. So I gave it a try. I spent some time formatting my article into the notepad format with each line not longer than 60 characters. What a pain to do that. I also had to create separate resource files. Then I hit the submit button. It kicked off and continued past my bedtime. I gave up waiting. When I checked the following morning, it took more than an hour! However, according to the log, some 4000 sites were contacted and 470 actual submissions were made. That was pretty good. But I have no way of verifying the result. There were no email in my inbox from the sites confirming the submission. Did everything go well? I'm completely sure at this point.

I think a mixed approach is probably a good way to go about it. For high quality articles, we want to manually submit to high PR sites. A couple of them (or maybe more) would suffice. For lighter weight articles, use the submitter to try to get more one-way back link to my site.