Article marketing has been a very effective traffic generation method for years. Experienced online business owners have come to recognize the benefits of article marketing, and have been consistently writing and publishing articles on various article directories. But the experienced article marketers don't just become experts overnight. They still have to test things out, write and submit articles regularly to be able to see the results that they want. Like everyone else, expert article marketers also face the same problems as new article marketers.

For instance, writing a decent article takes somewhere between twenty to forty minutes for most people. For prolific writers who can type fast, they can probably write an article in fifteen minutes. But that's the exception rather than the norm. Ideas don't come flowing every minute and all writers are faced with writer's block every now and then. And that takes up precious time - time that not everyone can afford. So they turn to other more immediate traffic sources like buying clicks, only to find themselves in deeper waters because this time, clicks cost money. And not everyone has deep pockets to keep buying clicks to test things out. So they go back to article marketing, since it's a potentially free source of traffic. This time, they are more determined to stick with it.

So they write four of five articles daily but before they could do a celebration dance, they realize that they still haven't submit their articles to the article directories. There are hundreds of directories out there and sitting at the workstation submitting articles is not exactly fun. Besides, simply submitting just one article to a hundred directories could easily take up a couple of hours. But no worries. Every persistent online business owner can always find a work around solution. So they turn to outsourcing, hoping to offload the workload to someone in the third world country. That is when they find that article submission services, even in third world countries, pay their staff by the hour. As cheap as they come, employers still have to pay their staff two to three dollars per hour just to do the submissions. And for every hour, a hardworking staff can only submit to about a hundred directories. You do the math. To make a profit, they now have to charge at least three dollars and above for every hundred submissions. That's not exactly cheap if you have more articles to submit.

Let's say you want to submit five articles per week to two hundred directories. The submission will probably cost you fifteen dollars and above per article. So that's a total of seventy five dollars per week, or three hundred per month. Who has three hundred to burn every month when the business is not making any money?

The only way out of this is to engage a professional article distribution service that charges less than three dollars per hundred submissions. Cheap and good deals are very rare, but they are out there if you look hard enough.