Right order of submitting articles?

Always on your own site first. No point in giving someone else's site the initial indexation rights. Your site can be the cumulative, long-term beneficiary of those.

If you feel like looking through a really long thread, in this one you'll find stacks of professional article marketers explaining all their shared reasons for always publishing their articles on their own sites first: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...eza-first.html

It will be fine with article directories.

Article directories don't require previously unpublished content.

Yes indeed. They meant "not original", too. Not "not unique". I think you're confusing "original" with "unique", here, aren't you, and imagining that the fact that it was previously published had something to do with their rejecting it?

Ezine Articles will certainly (and rightly) decline articles that they consider unoriginal, but that has nothing to do with whether they've been previously published on your own site: it's about whether the content in them is substantially similar to that in other articles already in Ezine Articles' database.

Ezine Articles has never declined an article for being previously published on the author's own site (or anywhere else, for that matter, as long as it's not stolen content), and they never will. This post explains more: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post4309204 .

Don't even think about doing it that way round, Grant: it makes no sense at all. Bear in mind what the purpose and function of an article directory is. Posts #2 and #6 of this thread explain in great detail: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872

I suspect that part of your confusion, here, comes from your concept of whatever it is you're referring to above as "article companies": I don't quite understand what you mean by "article companies". But be aware that "article directory" doesn't mean the same thing as "article submission site" - and this is enormously significant in terms of what you can submit to them. Those two posts in the thread linked to just above (and some further links to other posts inside one of them) will clarify this fully, I hope.

Generally, you should post the articles on your site first, and allow google index it first before sending them elsewhere. That's the strong voice all over but I beg to be slightly different...you should be able to know when to give all away.

Yes, you should also be looking into giving away indexing rights to very high traffic blogs by way of guest posting.

There's a whole lot of traffic waiting just from guest posting. I guess it's not catching on fast in the IM world because many people think it's too much work writing a great article and then finding publishers to host them. It's a mirage because these same people will spend more time on things that won't send even half as much traffic as the potential of guest posting.

And yes, you can outsource this too.