Useful (and Less Useful) Tools for Your Internet 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 online marketing products on offer claim that they can help you get more visitors to your website, generate tons of backlinks to your site for better rankings in search engines, support you in writing more content (or even getting content automatically), add tons followers on twitter while you sleep and much more.

Too bad the sales-pitches for these programs are often elusive about what exactly the software will do for you. 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 been my impression.

That's why I decided to make this overview of what kinds of software are most commonly available and whether or not they are worth buying.

Article Distribution Software:
Article submitters are mostly targeted 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.

This type of tool is definitelyworth it if you write many articles. For maximum effect, check to see that the software features automated registration to the article sites, automated email confirmation and basic article spinning functionality.

Directory or Search Engine Submission:
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 consisting of categorized links to other websites).

In my experience, this type of service is usually not 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 directories are mostly worthless (with the exception of the DMOZ and Yahoo directories).

Social Bookmarking Tools:
This type of program submits bookmarks of your web-pages to many different social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Mister-Wong, Diigo, reddit and many more. The software signs up, logs in and submits your bookmarks on autopilot and can save a lot of time.

Social bookmarking software is 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 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. Usually, they enable you to analyze any website you coose, 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 allow 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 invaluable to an Internet 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:
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 sort 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 a lot easier and so paying for it can be worth it (if the tool is a good one.

General Automation Tools:
You can purchase automation tools for practically everything. From simple little scripts that send a tweet out automatically, every time you publish a new post to your blog to all-in-one programs that run an entire marketing campaign for you and automatically upload content even adding links and images, there's hardly an online marketing related task you couldn't find an automation tool for.

Using software like this, it's hard to tell beforehand if they are really any good. Two things to keep in mind are 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 post tweets that you actually composed yourself, you can't expect your twitter profile to be particularly popular.

Of course, there are a lot of nuances and overlaps between the different Internet marketing tools available and I can't describe them all in detail in just one 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 program is worth what it costs and learn exactly how you can make the best use of it, it's best if you find a trustworthy review as well as perhaps some useful tutorials for each individual program.