Internet Marketing Products – An Overview

March 9, 2010 by toto

Whether you run a blog in your free time, do some online marketing on the side or are a full-time web marketer, you have probably come across several offers for products and software claiming to help you.

Many Internet marketing products on offer promise that they can help you drive traffic to your site, build lots of backlinks for better rankings in search engines, support you in writing more content (or even getting content automatically), add tons followers to your twitter account and much more.

Annoyingly, the sales-pitches 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 true for most sales-pages I’ve encountered.

That’s why I decided to make this overview of what kinds of tools are most commonly available and whether or not this kind of thing is worth the money.

Article Submission Software:
This type of software is usually 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 worth it if you write frequently enough. For maximum effect, make sure that the program features automatic registration to the article directories, 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).

Quite frankly, this type of service is usually not worth the price of admission. It’s not much use to you if your site 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).

Bookmarking Software:
This kind of software is used to distribute your websites to different social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Backflip, del.icio.us, 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 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 closed. So, if you go for a program like this, make sure there is some good guidance (documentation or video tutorials) offered along with the software.

Website Analysis Software:
Website analysis programs come in many shapes and sizes. Generally, they enable 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 allow you to assess 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.

Analysis tools are extremely useful to an Internet marketer, in my opinion. I would never move 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 in the same package as the analytics tools mentioned above. The purpose of such a program is to help you find an ideal keyword to go after with a new website or article. You can get a quick overview of 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 justified, if it’s good enough.

General Automation Tools:
You can find automation tools for almost anything. From simple little scripts that send a tweet out automatically, every time you publish a new post to your blog to complete programs that run an entire blog for you and automatically post content even adding links and images, there’s hardly an affiliate marketing related job you couldn’t find a piece of software for.

Using tools like these, it is difficult to tell in advance whether they are really any good. Remember that you will never get one hundred percent successful submissions and the results from using tools will always look somewhat “artificial”, no matter how good the software is. For example, if you use a twitter-automater and rarely or never post tweets you actually write yourself, you can’t expect your twitter profile to be particularly popular.

Of course, there are many nuances and overlaps among the different Internet marketing products 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 whether a system is worth the money and learn exactly how you can get the most out of it, it’s best if you find a reliable review as well as some helpful tutorials for every individual product.