As someone who has worked in newspaper journalism for 10 years, and now is in corporate public relations and dabbles in web site development on the side, I don't see the value in submitting "articles" to sites.

First, an article needs to contain facts, from unbiased sources - not just the opinions and knowledge of the author. If you're simply rattling off knowledge from your own head and sharing it with readers, that's not an article. That's something of an opinion piece, I guess. It has limited value to the reader.

Second, most of these article submission sites are of dubious quality at best. Do you go to article submission sites to get your information, or do you go to authoritative sources like CNN, your local newspaper, Yahoo News for news, or university and academic sites, corporate pages and government resources for research and factual data?

Third, if it takes you two hours to write and submit an article, are you getting a good return on investment? What else could you have been doing during that 2 hours to improve your own site, add new content, etc.? How much is your time worth? If you feel you are worth $30 an hour, did you get $60 of value in return for your effort in writing, editing and submitting? Or would it have been easier to pay $60 for an ad campaign and bring in hundreds of new visitors/customers to your pages to see the new, high-quality content you created for your own site?