Article submission services are usually either an online service or a program that you load onto your PC, that submits your articles to different article directories. The purpose of this service is to save you time in submitting your articles to different directories as that can be very time consuming. There are over 800 different article directories that you can submit your website to. If you were to do this by hand, and you took about 10 minutes each to submit an article it would take you over 8000 minutes or about 5 1/2 days per article. Article submission services cut down on that time significantly where you end up submitting an article once and then allow the submission service to submit the article for you.

There are 2 kinds of submission services.

1. Online submission services
2. Software submission services

This hub will focus on the online submission services as they are more flexible.

Some of the benefits of the online article submission servicess include:

1. More flexible with OS. You can use any platform that can use a standard browser.
2. More stable. If your computer crashes, you don't lose your ability to submit articles (if you have access to the article and access to a computer, then you are all set)
3. Faster. Online article submission services don't eat up your resources, and you are not limited by the speed of your computer connection to submit your articles to all of those article directories. You also don't have to lose access to your computer while your articles are being submitted to the article directories because the online service is using their system resources to submit the articles.
4. Automatic Updates: As new article directories come online, or as the service adds more features, you have the automatic benefit of receiving these updates without having to keep track of them yourself.

Some of the minuses of online article submission services include:

1. Usually you have to pay a monthly or annual fee to join the article submission service. Most of the time it is very reasonable however.
2. Unless there is a way to have different versions of your article, you are submitting the same content to all of the article directories. This really isn't going to hurt you in the search engines in any way, however the more versions of your article you have, the more times your articles will end up in more search results.

Additional Benefits of Online Article Submission Services:

1. They usually have an article directory and you can take advantage of an additional place to showcase your article.
2. They usually have statistics and you can use this information to see what people are interested in and what kinds of article titles entice people to read and download your article.

Some things to consider when using article submission services:

1. Make sure you follow the guidelines of the article submission service. They set up their guidelines to appeal to the directories they are submitting their articles to, and by not following them, you are only hurting yourself and lowering your chances of having your articles accepted by the directories.
2. Make sure you pick the appropriate category to submit your article to. Articles not submitted to the right category tend to not get accepted. If you have a habit of doing this, your account could be deleted from the directory.