Article submission!

I aggree with HzCy, but remember that depending on the authority (if much higher) of the sites you post on may out rank your post on your blog you intend to rank high for.

Wrong.

Google won't "see it as" duplicate content because it won't be duplicate content.

You've confused duplicate content with syndicated content.

They're two different things. The differences between the two are briefly explained in this post and this little article.

That's completely wrong.

Explained here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post7651906 <----- Please read it, HzCy, and stop repeating this nonsense. It helps nobody!

This, but there's very little point in submitting to more than one article directory, Arran (two at the most). What determine your traffic and your income are the other things you do with it, apart from putting it on your own site and into a directory or two: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5035794

This thread will help you: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872

And this one, too: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...marketing.html

With apologies for putting it so bluntly, all three of the replies above are just hopelessly wrong. Those posts represent the beliefs of all the people starting off all the threads with titles like "Is Article Marketing Dead?" (It is, for them, because they have the whole thing wrong and believe a whole bunch of urban-myth-based things which simply aren't true at all).

Sorry to be outspoken, but it becomes tiresome correcting all this stuff. If you want to learn "how it works", Arran, the 6 links I've given you, above, will between them answer about 99% of your questions, I think.

Quality backlinks come from relevant sites. Not from article directories.

Article directory backlinks are close to worthless. That was so even in 2009/10, before the Panda updates (when SEO textbook writers were pointing out that 50,000 - 100,000 of those backlinks gave the same linkjuice as one backlink on a quality, relevant site), and it's all the more so, now. But that, too, was never part of the purpose of using an article directory. An article directory is only a stepping-stone to getting traffic (and backlinks, if you insist) from the relevant sites who re-publish the articles, having looked them up there (not in Google!) in their "available content-sourcing". (That's even why they're called "directories"!). In short: clearly there's no point at all in trying to use article directories for the "benefit" of their own backlinks (that's actually been true ever since I've been online, back in 2008), but of course that's never been what article directories were there for, anyway.

The value of a backlink from any given page of the web is not somehow, magically, altered by whether or not the content to which it's attached has previously been published somewhere else (and that's the point the people mistakenly telling you to spin/change/edit your content haven't understood).

Ok for some Web 2.0 sites - not for others. Whenever you post on a site you don't yourself own, it's essential to read their terms of service.

Again, if you're thinking of doing it "for backlinks" ("why?!?!?!"), bear in mind that linkjuice is determined primarily by the relevance of the site (not the page) on which they appear. Web 2.0 sites are not relevant sites.

Article marketing isn't about backlinks and SEO, Arran. It's a traffic-generation method in its own right, which transcends SEO.

Google-dependency is no way to build a business, is it? Personally, I'd advise you not to put too much of your time and effort into trying to attract SEO traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious, makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings happen to be a minor side-benefit of the major targeted traffic-generation method I use, which brings me relevant backlinks) but I'd hate to have to make a living just from that traffic.

And even if spinning made sense it is just easier time -wise and for better readability to just rewrite the article.