Personally, I've never actually submitted to a shareware site manually. There are thousands of them out there, and doing it by hand is just WAY too time consuming. And most of them have very little to offer. EXCEPT for incoming links. That's right, pretty much every time a shareware site lists your software, there will be at least one link to your site. So how do we take advantage of it?
The answer is PAD. Never heard of it? Well, it's something from the Association of Shareware Profesionals. Basically, it's a definition for an XML file that contains all the relevant information about your software.
Know what the advantage is? You can post your PAD file on your website, and either submit it to the ASP repository, or tell shareware sites where to find it. It removes 99% of the work (you often have to specify the category manually), and they can check it at regular intervals for new versions. There's even an 'optional' section for adding references to other PAD files. So you can cross link your PAD files, and once once of them is picked up by a site, often the others are as well.