If you run a blog and are involved in online marketing to any extent, I’m sure you’ve already been pitched a fair share of Internet marketing products that are supposed to make all aspects of your work much easier.
Many online marketing products on offer promise that they can help you get more visitors to your website, build lots of backlinks for better rankings in search results, support you in writing more content (or even getting content automatically), add countless followers to your twitter account and much more.
Sadly, the sales-pitches for these programs are usually full of hype and almost devoid of any real information. It’s often more about how great your life will be once you hit the “order” button and less about what you’ll actually get. At least, that’s true for most sales-pages I’ve encountered.
That’s why I decided to write up a quick overview of what kinds of tools are most commonly available and whether or not this kind of thing is worth the money.
Article Submission Software:
Article submitters are usually targeted 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 can be very useful for getting more exposure for your articles and also for gaining backlinks to your website.
Article submission software is definitelyworth it if you write frequently enough. To make the most of it, make sure that the software includes automated registration to the article directories, automated email confirmation and basic article spinning features.
Directory or Search Engine Submission:
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 online directories (websites featuring nothing but categorized links to other websites).
In my opinion, this type of service is rarely (if ever) worth the price of admission. It’s not much use to you if your website is submitted to some unknown search engine in Lithuania and backlinks from website directories are relatively worthless (with the exception of the DMOZ and Yahoo directories).
Bookmarking Tools:
This type of program submits bookmarks of your web-pages to many different social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Backflip, Diigo, Mixx and many more. The software signs up, logs in and submits your bookmarks on autopilot and can save a lot of time.
Social bookmarking programs are generally good, but only if used correctly. If you use them as spamming tools to just blast the sites with low-quality links, you’ll quickly see your accounts banned. So, if you decide to purchase 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 allow you to analyze any website you want, in-depth. For example, they might show you how many backlinks a site 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 allow you to assess 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.
This type of software is essential to an affiliate marketer, in my opinion. I would never move into a new niche before completing some extensive research with such a program.
Keyword Research Tools:
These are often similar to, or part of the same product as the analysis tools mentioned above. The purpose of such a program is to help you find an ideal keyword to go after with a new website or piece of content. You can see the number of searches, results and competing pages there are for any given keyword and filter the results to narrow the search down and find your optimal keyword.
It isn’t mandatory 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 purchase automation tools for almost everything. From simple little scripts that send a tweet out automatically, every time you write a new post on your blog to complete systems that run an entire blog-network for you and automatically post content and add links and images, there’s hardly an online marketing related job you couldn’t find a piece of software for.
With tools like these, it’s not easy to tell in advance if they are any good. Remember 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 auto-tweet and rarely or never send tweets you actually composed yourself, don’t expect your twitter account to be particularly popular.
Of course, there are a lot of nuances and overlaps among the different affiliate marketing tools available and I can’t cover everything in this article. However, I hope this article helps you see past the hype and lofty promises on sales-pages.
To really get an idea of if a program is worth the money and learn exactly how you can get the most out of it, you need to find a trustworthy review and some helpful tutorials for every individual program.
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