Say I write about a topic and I am ready to submit. Can i submit the same article to the various article websites, or do I have to modify them ? with so many articles being submitted to article directories how can anyone figure the creme de la creme ? I see alot of bad articles on some places like ezine and they are 10 pages fulll. Finally, do you get backlinks from the article directories themselves or from people copying your article?
You can submit the same article over and over but dont have it on your site. Personally I try to write different articles to atttract more people. Although you see bad articles appearing dont worry about that, you want people to find your article so submit to the more popular ones like Ezine. Yes you will get back links from the article directory but your main goal is to have as many people place the article on their site giving a vast number of different back links.
I think you'll get the best results if you can find a site with a lot of traffic or PR (or both) and offer to write something unique for them. Not everyone will be interested, but this can be far more valuable than just submitting articles to article sites. That being said I still submit a lot of articles to Ezinearticles and Articlemarketer. However the articles that I spend a lot of time crafting go on my own site or as a guest post on someone else's. Most of the time I'll write two versions of an article. A quick and shorted version for articles sites and a longer more carefully written version for my own. When I submit to the article sites I link from the quick version to the long version in the author bio which helps me gain PR on my internal pages. You can also try using the Word AutoSummarize feature. Create a longer article for your site and then AutoSummarize it to post to article sites. You still have to read through it and probably change some of the wording to make sure it makes sense, but this can give you a head start on creating a shorter version for distribution.
I would reccomend 700-1,200 words personally. Many, but not all, of the article publishing sites are implementing requirements of a 500 word minimum or they will not publish the article. Additionally, if you do try to submit to article submission sites the article will be reviewed by a human being prior to being posted. A thorough and well written article is more likely to be accepted. I would also point out that there are numerous threads here at DP regarding article submissions and the benefits of them. You can do a quick search on DP for these threads; they may answer many of your questions. Just my 2 cents.