Article submission or the posting of articles to online directories and news groups has been around for quite some time but does it work? The answer is a resounding YES! If you are looking for a surefire way to drive traffic to your online business then article publication and submission is the way to go. But like most things in life there is a hard way and an easy way to achieve your goal. Writing interesting articles and submitting them to the hundreds of directories out there can be a very time consuming process to say the least.

Writing and submitting articles online has several benefits for your internet business whatever type of website you operate. First off though it may be worth once again going over why you would need to submit articles in the first place and more to the point just what you should expect to achieve by doing so. Chances are that you are reading this article because you have a web site that needs traffic. In fact a web site without traffic is like a car without gas , its going nowhere fast. You may have the flashiest high tech all singing all dancing web site on the net selling the best products or services but unless you can get people to see it the site may as well not exist.

So the main reason for submitting articles should be to drive that much needed traffic to your site. But there is more to it than that. One of the benefits of submitting articles is that it causes a link back to your site, not just from the directories that you post to but from the sites and blogs also use your article as content. The great thing about all these links back to your site (apart from all the free traffic) is that the major search engines will index your pages faster because they love to see incoming links. It gets better still though because more links equals higher page rank which puts your pages higher up the search engine results pages or "serps" as they are technically known.

On top of all this by submitting these articles you will gain credibility as an expert in your field, which in turn will make those articles even more popular with web masters and bloggers who are searching for quality content for their own readers but don't want to write content themselves. The other great thing is that once published or "set lose" on the net your articles will take on a life all of their own as more and more people use them. This is commonly known as viral marketing because of it's pervasive nature and the way it continues to spread across cyber space.

Like I said first off though, all this submitting business can physically take a great deal of time and effort to accomplish. The great news is that there are now several software programs available which will virtually automate the whole process. Now instead of spending hours submitting you articles to just a handful of directories you can send them to literally hundreds at the press of a button! That means more traffic, more back links to your site and higher page rank for a lot less effort.