Submitting articles to article directories is often a tedious process that involves author registration, proper formatting, and familiarity with the editorial guidelines set by each publisher. There are now hundreds of article directories that cater to both the general and niche markets. Because of the desire of authors to get their articles published on as many places as possible and the sheer number of article directories on the web, some authors have turned to automated submission software and third-party submission services to hasten the submission process.

The use of third-party submission agents presents an ethical problem. While some article directories dont care how articles are submitted to them, as long as the articles meet their editorial guidelines, many rely on authors as a major source of traffic to their sites. They want you, the author, to browse their sites, read their submission guidelines, and become a regular visitor to their sites in return for distributing your article.

Any article directory that cares about the quality of articles they publish will spend some time to review each submitted article before publishing it. As an article publisher myself, I can attest to the work involved in reviewing, reformatting, and correcting minor errors of every article submitted to me. Since I get hundreds of submissions every day, I am forced to reject any articles that appear as if theyve been submitted by a third party or through an automated submission process.

Its not exactly rocket science to distinguish between an article submitted by hand and one submitted through an automated process. The software-submitted article may be improperly formatted, suggesting that the submitter never bothered to read the submission guidelines before submitting their article. It may be missing a required field, or it may be submitted to the wrong category. Different article sites stipulate different guidelines and requirements for what they accept. Its not possible for an automated submitter to take into account all of these differences to allow you to submit to several hundred directories with a few clicks of the mouse button.

Many article publishers do not even allow manual submissions by third-party submission services. A common telltale sign that an article has been submitted through a third-party service is when a single author account is used to submit multiple articles with different resource boxes. Submissions from multiple author accounts from a single IP address are another indication of third-party submission.

Any software program that promises to do 99% of the work for you does nothing more than spamming your article all over the web. Some of these spam machines even post a link along with your article back to the submission software. This is a sure-fire way to get your article rejected and even get you banned from some directories.

Ideally, authors should submit their articles by hand. Meanwhile, there is an understandable need for a way to quickly submit to a great number of sites. An acceptable compromise between laborious manual submission and a completely automated process is a semi-manual tool that allows you to browse article sites as well as quickly submit articles to them. Article Submitter is an inexpensive semi-manual submitter that stores your article, personal information, and resource box as you visit each article site. When youre ready to submit your article, the software auto-fills the submission forms for you, eliminating the need for tedious copying and pasting. The whole process is very much like manual submission, only a lot faster.