Depending on available resources and personal preference, there is more than one way to tackle the practice of article submission. You can choose manual submission if you want to take care of the submission personally; you can hire a dedicated submission service to publish your text materials to various Internet resources; or you can rely on software tools to automate the submission process and save time. 

However, regardless of the options you decide to try out, without allocating a great deal of your time to researching the best possible directories before choosing one, you can not be sure whether the submission will prove successful.

When you encounter article submission services or software solutions claiming to be able to get you thousands of backlinks based on the submission process, it may be wise to take their provided “guarantees” with a grain of salt and double-check their claims before drawing money out of your pocket.  

Some second-hand services submit articles to directories that are not at all functional. In such cases, even if they are indeed fulfilling the task of submitting articles as promised, your text materials will make their way to resources that never receive any visitors, which renders hiring such companies nothing more than a waste of your money. Others may be submitting your articles to blogs or social media sites they have set up in advance to give the impression that your articles are being sent to hundreds of directories. Although they too submit articles somewhere, considering their fixed sites receive virtually no traffic at all and may have disastrous page ranks, what they are in fact doing is ripping you off.     

Another likely scenario is when you hire an article submission service and are noticed soon after about your articles not being compatible with the niche directories they usually submit to. Eventually they may restrict the submission to only a small number of average directories, to which you could have probably submitted your articles yourself completely free of charge. 

Overall, despite getting you to believe that they are submitting to hundreds of niche-relevant online directories, many services are not in fact doing that. Even when they do submit to as many directories as they brag in their ads, these resources are probably picked at random, which means you have no guarantees over their quality and reliability. However, there is always room for exceptions in this, and along the way you may also encounter a select few services that can substantiate their claims and provide you with actual guarantees of their worth.

Seeing how important it is to know how to avoid submission scams and second-hand services with untruthful offers, let’s now focus the discussion on finding the right places for submitting articles.

First of all, if you prefer submitting articles manually, only do so to highly active directories with good page rankings and that receive appreciable amounts of traffic. Although you probably won’t be able to submit to hundreds of directories as some services advertise, if you stick with the best resources in the branch you will virtually eliminate the need to submit to more than a few.

If you are after the convenience that a good article submission service can offer, then take your time and select carefully, guiding your decision on factors like prominence in the business, credibility, reliability, and finally yet importantly, affordability.