There are probably dozens of article submission software in the market nowadays such as Article Post Robot, Article Submitter, Artemis Pro, Article Announcer and so on. These software are built to submit your articles to hundreds of free article directories. But the questions I kept hearing over at article marketing forums and blogs are whether these article submission software really work and whether you can get penalized for duplicate content.

Personally, I have used quite a number of article submission software and services to submit my articles to the directories. The truth is they do work well in a few ways. I have written hundreds of articles and for each article, I will submit them to hundreds of free article directories using my software. Just what are the effects and benefits?

For each article submitted to the directories, all it takes is a few hours semi-automatic or automatic submission. I compared this to the amount of time I used to spend submitting manually and that is a huge difference. I managed to cut my time by more than 90%. Not only so, after checking Google about 2 to 3 days later, I start to see quite a number of backlinks coming from these articles to my website. A lot of these articles get indexed quickly within the next week or so and soon, I have more than a few hundred backlinks for my website from article directories.

Having checked the traffic logs, I realized that using these article submission software not only gets me more organic traffic from the search engines, some of the traffic are coming from article directories as well as other related websites that picked up my articles. So in other words, I am getting both organic traffic as a result of my increased link popularity, and inorganic traffic from visitors at the article directories, articles that are indexed in the search engines and traffic from related websites.

But my experience is that some article submission software are built using more intelligent engines. To quote an example, some software simply cannot do a good job of posting to the correct article category. That is the biggest headache for me but I quickly realized it and switched to those which are smart enough to recognize which category to submit my articles under. Since then, it has worked well for me.

What about duplicate content from submitting the same article to hundreds of article directories using article submission software? Well, the duplicate content filter does kicks in eventually after a month or two, but you will realize that in the long run, on average 30 to 60% of the articles still remain indexed so you still get a fair bit of traffic and link popularity from there. To me, it is fair since I am saving tons of time that I can use to write more articles.

Discover some cool article marketing tips and read up a review I have done on features, effectiveness, deliverability and affordability of the different article submission software article marketers are using.