If you are a blogger, a webmaster, a part-time or even a full-time Internet marketer, you’ve probably already seen qute a few different offers for products that promise to reduce your workload and improve your results.
Many online marketing products available claim 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 search results, write more and/or better content, add thousands of followers to your twitter account and much more.
Unfortunately, the sales-pages for these products 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 been my impression.
That’s why I decided to make this overview of what kinds of tools are most commonly available and whether or not they are worth buying.
Article Submission Software:
Article submitters are usually 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. The more directories your articles are posted to, the more backlinks you get and the more exposure your writing gets online.
A good article submitter is definitelyworth it if you write frequently enough. For maximum effect, check to see that the program features automated registration to the article directories, automated email confirmation and basic article spinning features.
Directory or Search Engine Submission Software:
Directory and search engine submissions are available 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 experience, this type of service is rarely (if ever) worth it’s price. There’s not much benefit in it for you if your site is submitted to some obscure search engine in Lithuania and links from website directories are mostly worthless (with the exception of some high-authority ones like Yahoo and DMOZ).
Bookmarking Tools:
This kind of software is used to distribute your websites to different social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Mister-Wong, Diigo, 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.
These programs are 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 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 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 invaluable to an affiliate marketer, in my opinion. I would not even consider into a new niche before completing some extensive research with such a program.
Keyword Research Software:
These are often similar to, or part of the same product as the analytics tools mentioned above. The purpose of such a program is to help you find an ideal keyword to target with a new website or article. You can see the number of searches, results and competing pages there are for any given keyword and sort the results to narrow the search down and find your optimal keyword.
It isn’t mandatory to spend money on 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 software for practically anything. From simple little things that send a tweet out automatically, every time you publish a new post to your blog to complete programs that run an entire blog-network for you and automatically upload content and add links and images, there’s hardly an online marketing related job you couldn’t find an automation tool for.
With such programs, it’s difficult to tell in advance if they will be worth it. 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. As an example, if you use a program for automating twitter-updates but rarely or never send tweets you actually write yourself, you can’t expect your twitter account to be terribly popular.
Of course, there are many nuances and overlaps among the different affiliate marketing products available and I can’t describe them all in detail in just one 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 get an idea of if a program is worth what it costs and learn how you can make the best use of it, you should try to find a reliable review as well as some helpful tutorials for every individual program.
