That seems to give a lot of good info for general marketing and seo tips but article submission seems to be a specific niche. Is there a best way to promote it?
Pretty much the same principles apply as to any other website promotion. You'll need to hire a SEO team or work hard to have your website ranked for a few long tail keywords such as "article directory" - "articles directory" and so on .. Meanwhile you can announce your article directory on several webmaster forums, that might give your site a kick for a start. Al.
If I were you, I would try promoting it with articles. If you submit these articles to the major directories like EZA, they'll get in front of the eyes of lots of frustrated article marketers who are looking for a way to get more exposure to their articles.
Find some long tail keywords related to article submissions with very low competition that have no squidoo lenses or ezine articles in the top 10 then make squidoo lenses and ezine articles and build a few links to each - dominate google for the long tails! I would also buy signatures from people with a high comment count on as many related forums as you can find as that is your target market. (as well as keep contributing your own comments) Somebody contacted me via PM the other day after they had seen my post about articles, he said if I joined up and sent him my username he would make sure that my articles got approved quickly. Not sure if that is against forum rules or not but it didn't bother me!
You can learn more about several on webmaster forums and join webmaster forum, be active regular, do blog comment, links building, sell links, ads space and write content for other, show proof through your website and more ideas where you can promote your website.
Well, getting people to submit articles will help with page rank over time. You can also write article to other directories.
I myself have created an article submission site (relatively small but still pulling in a steady stream of cash =]), i chose to promote it the same as any other site ; articles, social bookmarks, press release, some ppc, and all into a list builder to give future profit opportunities.
I would have thought writing a tonne of articles for a competitive niche that marketers often check out would be best. Then submitting them to your own site and ranking them up. When other marketers see that this site keeps popping up in competitive niches, they will switch over to you. It has happened time and time again with things like Squidoo, Hubpages, Quizilla, Scribd etc.