"First, an article needs to contain facts, from unbiased sources - not just the opinions and knowledge of the author."

High-traffic sites are filled with good articles that are just opinions from the author. Look at how many books are in the bookstores that don't contain facts. Onion.com has a lot of visitors, but just about all their stories are made up.


"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."

Say what?! *chokes on lunch* I'm sorry, but I don't know where you got that idea from.


"Second, most of these article submission sites are of dubious quality at best."

Agreed. One has ot submit them to the actual content sites, like Askmen, iVillage, MSN, About, or, this site.


"Third, if it takes you two hours to write and submit an article, are you getting a good return on investment?"

When it is submitted to multiple sites, and it can be used over and over again in the future, yes.


"But I don't think that's the kind of business model/advertising strategy that strong web sites should follow. It places value on promotion rather than valuable website content."

Do both.



"Like I said, I don't seek out these internet articles as authoratative sources of information. To me, they are just clogging up the internet with meaningless drivel. I can't imagine who else would find an article, written by a relatively unknown author, expressly for the purpose of marketing their website, as something valuable."

The people who continously go to content sites like the ones I mentioned above do.

But, hey, different strokes for different folks.