Whether you run a blog in your free time, do some online marketing on the side or are a full-time web marketer, you have probably come across several offers for products and software claiming to help you.
Many Internet marketing products available promise that they can help you attract massive amounts of traffic to your website or blog, help you create lots of backlinks for better rankings in Google search results, support you in writing more content (or even getting content automatically), add hundreds of followers to your twitter account and much more.
Too bad the sales-pages for these programs usually lack any kind of tangible information about what the product will actually do for you. The main purpose is to get you interested and excited so that you’ll hit that “order now!” button – too bad if it was information you were looking for. At least, that’s true for most sales-pages I’ve encountered.
That’s why I decided to make this overview of what kinds of software are most commonly available and whether or not they are worth buying.
Article Submission Software:
This type of software is mostly aimed at article marketers. What these programs do is log into lots of different online article directories and submit your article to each of them. This way, the software allows you to submit your articles to dozens or even hundreds of directories easily and quickly.
A good article submitter is definitelyworth it if you write frequently enough. To get the most out of it, make sure that the software includes automatic registration to the article sites, automatic email confirmation and basic article spinning features.
Directory or Search Engine Submission Software:
This is often offered either as a software package or as a service. What this does is submit your website URL to lots of different search engines (often, they submit to hundreds or even thousands) and website directories (websites consisting of categorized links to other websites).
Quite frankly, this type of service is almost never worth the price of admission. There’s not much benefit in it for you if your website is submitted to some unknown search engine in Lithuania and links from directories are virtually worthless (with the exception of some high-authority ones like Yahoo and DMOZ).
Social Bookmarking Tools:
Automatic social bookmarking programs submit any websites you choose to lots of social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Mister-Wong, del.icio.us, Mixx and many more. The software automates the task of signing up, logging in and submitting your bookmarks and can save a lot of time.
Social bookmarking software is generally good, but only if you use them the right way. If you use them as spamming tools to just blast the sites with low-quality links, you’ll quickly see your accounts closed. So, if you go for a program like this, make sure there are good instructions (documentation or video tutorials) offered along with the software.
Competition Analysis Software:
Website analysis tools come in many shapes and sizes. Mostly, they enable you to analyze any website you want, in detail. For example, they might show you how many backlinks a website has, where those links are coming from, how many of it’s pages are indexed in Google and so on.
The point of all this is to give you the ability you to estimate your competitor’s strength before you move into a new market. You can find out in detail what a page has going for it and why it’s ranking well and with that information you can see what you need to do to outperform that page.
Competition analysis programs are essential to an online marketer, in my opinion. I would not even consider into a new niche without having spent some time analyzing my competition with such a tool.
Keyword Research Software:
These are often similar to, or part of the same product as the analytics tools mentioned above. These tools aim to help you find the best possible keywords to target with a new website or piece of content. You can get a quick overview of the number of searches, results and competing pages there are for any given keyword and filter the results according to your needs.
It isn’t absolutely necessary to pay for a keyword research tool, since you can use the one offered by Google for free. However, a good tool can make research much easier and so paying for it can be justified, if it’s good enough.
General Automation Tools:
You can find automation tools for practically anything. From simple little things that send a tweet out automatically, every time you publish a new post to your blog to entire programs that run an entire blog-network for you and automatically post content even adding links and images, there’s hardly an Internet marketing related task you couldn’t find a piece of software for.
Utilizing software like this, it is hard to tell beforehand if they will be worth it. Keep in mind that you will never get one hundred percent successful submissions and the results from using tools will always look somewhat “artificial”, no matter how good the software is. For example, if you use a twitter-automater but rarely or never send tweets you actually composed yourself, you can’t expect your twitter account to be terribly popular.
Of course, there are a lot of nuances and overlaps among the different online marketing tools available and I can’t cover everything in this article. However, I hope you can now see through the hype on sales-letters a bit more easily and get an idea of what’s behind it all.
To really know if a system is worth the money and learn exactly how you can make the best use of it, you need to find a trustworthy review and some useful tutorials for every individual product.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
<p>In order to be successful in internet marketing you have to use your resources and you have to have good strategy. Thank you for sharing this post. Very helpful.</p>
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<p>An honest set of reviews. </p> <p>Article submitters are counterproductive from what I've learned about SEO. You are penalized by search engines whenever they detect duplicates. Fresh, new, content is prized above all else so 500 copies of the same article is pretty much that article's death sentence as far as search engine rank.</p> <p>I also agree with your view of general automation software. Tweet bots accounts generate little interest among fellow tweeters. If you use a bot make sure to send out hand-written tweets on occasion or else no one will care about what you're tweeting. People crave human interaction above all else.</p>
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