One of the first things you have to decide is, are you writing for search engines, or for your readers. This has become more important as more content takes up valuable real estate on the Internet today.

Search engines are looking to avoid duplicate content, yet there are literally thousands of article directories all with the same articles in them.

So how do you do this?

If you're writing specifically for your readers then it really is irrelevant how many article directories contain the same article. As a matter of fact, it is to your benefit to have your articles in as many places as possible.

If you are writing for search engines, then you're really looking for your content to be unique no matter where it's placed. A search engine is really only going to place one of your articles around a keyword phrase one time.

It is not to their benefit to have several article directories on page 1 of the same phrase that all contain the exact same article that you've written. Therefore from a search engine benefit is to your benefit to alter the content before you submit it to individual article directories.

There is a company known as Submityourarticle.com that offers a very unique program called Article Leverage. With them you can write one article, and then turn it in to hundreds of unique versions by rewriting it and letting their software create unique articles.

They then submit these to hundreds of article directories all of which are getting a unique version of it. This is really a win-win situation because you stand a great chance of getting ranked on various search engines, as well as being accepted by multiple article directories for writing just one article.

If you choose to just go after traffic from readers, you may want to consider writing as many articles as possible on a daily basis and submitting them to a handful of your favorite directories. You might even go so far as to just target one article directory such as Ezine articles.com, where they will accept shorter articles of 250 words.

Regardless of how you choose to do it successful article marketing does work. You just need to come up with a system that you can do on a consistent basis.