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 Internet marketing products available claim that they can help you drive traffic to your site, generate tons of backlinks to your site for better rankings in Google search results, support you in writing more content (or even getting content automatically), add tons followers to your twitter account and much more.
Unfortunately, the sales-pages for these products are usually full of hype and almost devoid of any real information. 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 a quick overview of what kinds of tools are most commonly available and whether or not they are worth buying.
Article Submission Software:
These programs are usually aimed at article marketers. Article submission software will automatically log into many different article directories and automatically fill out the fields required with your pen name, article title, body and resource box and then submit the article. This can be very useful for getting more exposure for your articles and also for gaining backlinks to your website.
This type of tool is definitelyworth it if you write frequently enough. To get the most out of it, make sure that the software features automatic registration to the article sites, automatic email verification and basic article spinning functionality.
Directory or Search Engine SubmissionTools:
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 featuring nothing but categorized links to other websites).
In my opinion, this type of service is rarely (if ever) worth the money. It’s not much use to you if your homepage is submitted to some obscure search engine in Lithuania and backlinks from online directories are almost completely worthless (with the exception of some high-authority ones like Yahoo and DMOZ).
Bookmarking Tools:
This type of program submits bookmarks of your web-pages to many different social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Mister-Wong, del.icio.us, Mixx and many more. The software signs up, logs in and submits your bookmarks on autopilot and can save a lot of time.
These programs are generally good, but only if you use them the right way. If you simply use them to spam all of your pages to as many sites as possible, you’ll quickly see your accounts shut down. 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. Usually, they allow you to analyze any website you want, in detail. 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 evaluate your competitor’s strength before you move into a new market. You can find out why a page is ranking well in the search results and in turn, learn what you would need to do in order to outrank that page with one of yours.
This type of software is extremely useful to an online marketer, in my opinion. I would never move into a new market before completing some extensive research with such a program.
Keyword Research Software:
Products like this 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 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 worth it (if the tool is a good one.
General Automation Tools:
You can buy automation software for almost anything. From simple little things that send a tweet out automatically, every time you publish a new post to your blog to entire systems that run an entire blog for you and automatically upload content even adding links and images, there’s hardly an affiliate marketing related task you couldn’t find an automation tool for.
Utilizing such programs, it is difficult to know in advance if they will be any good. Remember that the success-rate will never be 100% with such bots and that your results will always look automated, at least to some extent. For example, if you use a twitter-automater but never send updates you actually write yourself, you can’t expect your twitter profile to be terribly popular.
I mus also add that there are many nuances and overlaps among the different online 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 be sure of if a system is worth the money and learn how you can get the most out of it, it’s best if you find a reliable review as well as perhaps some helpful tutorials for every individual product.
RSS FEED
