Article syndication

I am starting to explore article syndication as a means of promoting a site. I have been working with a pretty good SEO agency who have handled article syndication over the couple of years - with much success in terms of baiting links.

However, now I'm trying to do it for a site on my own and finding it hard work to get started. The key thing the SEO agency seem to bring to the party is knowledge of what sites are worth posting to. It seems to be very hard work to research this yourself - many article submission sites reek of spam and I am very cautious about what I am prepared to get involved with.

Are there any credible sources out there for getting rolling on article submission, or am I looking down the barrel of a long grind to get going here?

Ben.

If your articles are low quality, syndicate them. If they are genuine, unique, expert content then post them on your own site and solicit links from related sites. If you write well enough that some of what you write will be successful at slashdot, digg, stumble, reddit... then you are really in a great position to succeed without syndication.

We spend zero time on syndication. It feeds your competitors and invites them into your SERPs... plus it doubles your content generation work because you don't want syndicated articles on your own site.

Agreed. With that said. In my opinion, the two top sites if you decide to syndicate just for seed links hands down are ezinearticles.com (free) and articlemarketer.com (varies depending on plan, there is a free syndication package).

Articles are a means to an end. Using the author's resource box, is an easy way to get links to deep interior pages without having to impress large amounts of people or competing to get on the first page of Digg. Ezinearticles.com does provide a certain amount of traffic, but really it's just for deep links.

Guest blogging on industry thought leader sites is the new article marketing tactic. Although, there are draw backs. You have to convince the blog owner of the worthiness of your content. You can get some more benefits and drawbacks by reading this blog post : Is Article Marketing Dead?

Coincidentally, I just listened to an audio cast of a popular affiliate marketer who has made around 1 million in affiliate commissions. I can not endorse his list, but below are his 80/20 rule article syndication sites if you will.

ezinearticles.com
goarticles.com
articlecity.com
ideamarketers.com
articlesbase.com
searchwarp.com

Some of these get posted to if you sign up for articlemarketer.com, but you would do better by having individual authors and profiles on each.

**Update**
Although some may be "no follow," Mahalo, Squidoo, and Knol are probably some of the hottest places to put high quality, non commercial articles. These would require more conscious effort with qualified traffic being the goal, not just link juice.

Thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated.

articlebase put nofollow plus they include their own links within your articles. I will not recomend you to use it for SEO purposes