I'm currently working on a Health & Fitness Blog, I was just wondering if article directories would help in marketing. Do they actually send traffic and will they help with PR? Also do articles i submit all have to be different, in other words can i submit one article to a few different sites or will i be penalized for duplicates. Thanks =]
try submitting in top article directories with high pr, that should help you get some visitors. submit in very few of them not all.
I would recommend that you only submit to a select few article directories. In my experience over the years I have submitted to many many different article directories. I have only seen significant traffic from two of them Ezine Articles and The Chronicle.
Don't forget that the other benefit of article submission is the back link to your site usually added in the author bio section. If your article gets picked up and used by smaller relevent sites, this can help increase your SERP's...
You may find my list of Quality Article Directories good and useful. Some of them have A besides their URLs --those are what people popularly call Authority sites with site-links. As per as traffic are concerned -- They might not send much --but they are your source of free permanent links which will help you in serps. Buy health related articles--submit one unique articles to each of the top article directories.
I think better to use those articles in your blog rather than submitting it to different article sites.