Web Resource World

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, help you create lots of backlinks for better rankings in Google, write more and/or better content, add countless followers to your twitter account and much more.

Sadly, the sales-pitches 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 write up this overview of what kinds of software are most commonly available and whether or not they are worth buying.

Article Distribution Software:
This type of software is 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. This way, the software allows you to submit your articles to dozens or even hundreds of directories easily and quickly.

This type of tool is worth it if you you are a determined article marketer. To make the most 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 online directories (websites featuring nothing but categorized links to other websites).

Quite frankly, this type of service is almost never worth the price of admission. It’s not much use to you if your homepage is submitted to some obscure search engine in Lithuania and backlinks from website directories are practically worthless (with the exception of the DMOZ and Yahoo directories).

Social Bookmarking Software:
This type of program submits bookmarks of your web-pages to many 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.

Social bookmarking 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 banned. So, if you go for 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. Usually, they enable you to analyze any website you want, in detail. For example, they might show you how many backlinks a page 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 assess 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.

Competition analysis programs are invaluable to an online marketer, in my opinion. I would not even consider into a new market 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. 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 see the number of searches, results and competing pages there are for any keyword you choose and filter the results to narrow the search down and find your optimal keyword.
It isn’t absolutely necessary 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 worth it (if the tool is a good one.

General Automation Tools:
You can buy automation software for practically anything. From simple little programs that send a tweet out automatically, every time you write a new post on your blog to complete programs that run an entire blog for you and automatically upload and distribute content even adding links and images, there’s hardly an Internet marketing related job you couldn’t find an automation tool for.

Using 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. For example, if you use a program for automating twitter-updates but practically never send tweets that you actually write yourself, don’t expect your twitter account to be terribly popular.

Of course, there are many nuances and overlaps between the various online marketing products 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 product is worth what it costs and learn how you can get the most out of it, you should try to find a reliable review as well as some useful tutorials for every individual product.