Useful (and Useless) Tools for Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts
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 out there promise that they can help you get more visitors to your website, generate tons of backlinks to your site for better rankings in search results, write more and/or better content, add tons followers to your twitter account and much more.
Sadly, 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 been my impression.
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 Distribution Software:
Article submitters are generally 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. The more directories your articles are posted to, the more backlinks you get and the more exposure your writing gets online.
Article submission software 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 directories, automatic email confirmation and basic article spinning functionality.
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 featuring nothing but categorized links to other websites).
Quite frankly, this type of service is usually not worth it’s price. It’s not much use to you if your site is submitted to some unknown search engine in Lithuania and backlinks from directories are mostly worthless (with the exception of the DMOZ and Yahoo directories).
Social Bookmarking Software:
Automatic social bookmarking programs submit any websites you choose to lots of social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Mister-Wong, Diigo, reddit 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 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.
Website Analysis Software:
Website analysis programs come in many shapes and sizes. Mostly, they allow you to analyze any website you coose, 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 give you the ability you to estimate 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.
Analysis tools are essential to an Internet marketer, in my opinion. I would not even consider into a new niche without having spent some time analyzing my competition with such a program.
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 go after with a new website or piece of content. You can see how many searches, results and competing pages there are for any keyword you choose and sort the results according to your needs.
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 a lot easier and so paying for it can be justified, if it’s good enough.
General Automation Tools:
You can find automation software for practically anything. From simple little scripts that automatically post tweets, every time you publish a new post to your blog to all-in-one systems that run an entire blog-network for you and automatically upload and distribute content and add links and images, there’s hardly an Internet marketing related job you couldn’t find a piece of software for.
Using such programs, it is difficult to tell in advance if they will be any good. Keep in mind 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 practically never send tweets that you actually write yourself, you can’t expect your twitter profile to be particularly popular.
Of course, there are a lot of nuances and overlaps among the different Internet 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 product is worth it and learn exactly how you can get the most out of it, you should try to find a trustworthy review and some good tutorials for every individual product.
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Free Keyword Research - Why Do You Need to Do Keyword Research?
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