Article marketing has become so popular that website owners nowadays are leaning on this method to promote their websites much more than any other method. Website owners get articles written pertaining to their own websites and then put them up on article directories with a link to their own site. When someone reads the article, they will also click on the link and visit the website. This will build up traffic, which could help in several ways, generating leads, allowing providing free offers, getting exposure and even getting some actual sales done. But, it must be noted here that the need is as much of the article directories themselves as of the owners of the websites. Article directories need content on their sites. That is the reason why they accept articles from people across the world in the first place. Most popular article directories are accepting articles from website authors for free and are allowing them to put a back link to their websites in the author's box below the article. But, even though the articles are accepted for free, the article directories do make their businesses in many other ways. They host banner ads and pay-per-click ads, which is the main source of their revenue. Then there are some people who would like to buy articles from directories. For a website owner, knowing about article marketing is the first step in making the proper utilization of this tool. Everyone learns about writing a great article and developing your website to get the maximum benefits from it. But one point seriously lacking in information is how to submit to article directories and how often. This is where we elaborate on this region of article directories. Submitting to article directories is no big deal actually. You can find many popular article directories if you make a simple Internet search. But you must choose the article directory with care. If the directory is not dynamic, it will serve no purpose for you. You can find how popular a directory is by looking at the date of the last post. A very good article directory will have several hundred submissions daily. But there are some article directories that have their last submissions done over six months back even. You must be sure to avoid submitting on such directories. Most likely, no one visits there anymore. When you have your article written, you have to submit the article on the website of the article directory. It might take a couple of hours or even a few days to get your article checked and actually put up on the site. Almost all article directories will allow you to submit the same article to other directories also, since the directory will not hold any copyrights to the article. However, you should refrain from doing this. Similar content can bad mark a website, and that would extend to the link of your website mentioned in that article also. So, you must rework your article a bit - at least 40% - before submitting it on other directories. The frequency of article submissions is an important point. If you submit too less, then there will be no impact on the traffic whatsoever. On the other hand, if you submit too frequently with the same website URL, there's all chance Google and other search engines will penalize the URL. In the beginning, submit one article per week on about three different article directories. Then increase this frequency in gradual steps to one per day within about four months. This is the speed you must keep up with. If you are not good at writing, or cannot meet with this requirement, you would do better to hire a freelance writer. However, you must make it clear to them that you need these articles for marketing, and not for putting up on your own website. That does make a big difference in the style of writing. Submitting articles to the right article directories is just as important as writing the articles. If you want your article marketing campaign to work for you, it is not good to ignore this all-important aspect of submissions.