Yesterday I check my StatPress and I was surprised to see that people were reading my article which I submitted to many article directories using digiXMAS Article Submitter and since my traffic is almost zero, I was glad that it did bring in some readers to my site. Article submission is time consuming to say the least, as I am doing it as part of my job as a Virtual Assistant to one client from Australia but if your article is interesting enough people will read it and is more likely to visit your site because you've captured their attention.
digiXMAS is free and is easy to use, although you need to set up a new e-mail address just for this one because there are 700+ directories in which it will register your account and you don't want that to fill your main inbox. I did set up a Gmail account for this one and set the pop mail to be forwarded because the software will also get the links and activate them all for you, so you don't get to waste any time clicking on the activation link.
I find it very helpful because I have so many things to do in a day, and promoting my blog is the least of my priority and the reason why I stumble upon digiXMAS is because I was searching for a free software which I can recommend to my client. I tried it in my site first to make sure that I'm not recommending something that is of no value or will not deliver results, in short I am making a test run on my articles.
What I found out however is that article submission is still better done manually if your main goal is blog promotion and you want to get it right. Why? Because every article directory is not the same. The title field sometimes has a limited number of characters and you have to decide how to shorten a long title right there. Bio/Author box is the same, sometimes there is no limit but other sites have limited characters so you also need to edit the bio to make a clear and effective shorten version of it.
What else, if you want to submit your article to more than one category you cannot do it using software (at least with digiXMAS) because you can only choose one during the process of submission, unlike if you do it manually. Although article directories also differ on this matter, others allow the same article to be submitted in as many categories you while others does not allow duplicate articles even if you will post it to different categories.
All in all article submission is beneficial to blog promotion because you can get one way link to your site and the traffic that you get are targeted ones because they got to your site reading your article, which translates to "they want to get more?, or ?they want to know more" about you or your site. This is why content is always referred to as "King", because in the end if the people cannot find any more interesting in your site, they will not come back anymore.