Article Submission Software and Other Tools
Lesson 13 from You Can Make Money Writing
The following lesson is based on my own experiences with article
submission software and article submission services. The latter
charge you a fee for submitting your articles to many directories
and newsletters. The fee may be a monthly fee, usually with some
limit as to how many articles you can submit, or they may charge
you a fee for each article they handle. The idea is that you
can spend your time writing articles to promote your website
while they do the tedious work of submitting them to the directories
and other places.
Do they work? Probably, given the glowing testimonials from
some authors. Of course those authors may have never tried doing
the submissions on their own, or didn't have a system for doing
so efficiently. I have not tried these services myself, except
for the free version of one, which did limited distribution.
I didn't notice any real improvement in traffic. I think one
of the problems is that there are only so many directories out
there that are of decent quality and traffic, so your article
gets submitted to many that just don't help much.
It takes us less than thirty minutes each day to submit an
article to a dozen or more article directories, so I'm not sure
how much time these services could save me.
It is true that the good article submission services can submit
your articles to hundreds of places once you spend the five minutes
to fill in the forms. I'm just not sure of what value this is.
I used to submit to thirty article directories manually, but
even then I still saw more results from EzineArticles.com than
from all the others put together. In other words, the additional
value of another hundred low-traffic, low-PageRank directories
may not amount to much in the end.
But please let me know if you find a service that really seems
to work. I am always open to finding new ways to make the whole
process more efficient and effective. And that brings us to the
next "tool" you might consider:
Article Submission Software
Early on, I tried one of the "best" submission software
products (don't they all say that?). The idea here is that you
program in which directories to submit to, then fill in the forms
with your article, and push "submit." The software
is supposed to do the rest.
It didn't work for me. The submission guidelines are different
for each directory, so you have to enter alternate descriptions,
HTML and non-HTML versions and such. In the end, it was terribly
difficult to learn how to use, and then didn't save me any time.
I asked for and received a refund.
I should mention that the makers of this particular product
later claimed they had simplified it and worked out the "bugs."
Still, given that many article directories clearly state that
they won't take automated article submissions, I wondered if
I would have to manually submit my articles to the better directories
anyhow.
We Finally Buy One
Eventually we bought another one: Article Submitter. I would
like to tell you that it was easy to use, and works flawlessly.
Here is what I actually think:
There will never be a decent article submission software program
that is easy to understand, easy to set up and use, and that
works for all the article directories you want to submit your
articles to.
Now, having said that, I can also say that we kept this one
and use it regularly. It was a real pain to set up (ask my wife
- I would have asked for a refund the third hour into the process
if it was left up to me), and it cannot be used for the best
directories. It fulfills some of the claims made on the sales
page (maybe even half of them?), and it is nice to have my articles
going out to another 100 or so directories, with only about ten
minutes work for each now.
But let me make it clear that this is a tool best suited to
those who plan to really do some serious article writing and
distribution. The frustration is just not worth it if you won't
be doing more than an article a month. You can't use it on my
favorite, for example, EzineArticles.com, and that directory
delivers two or three times as much traffic as all the 100 auto-submitted
ones put together.
Also, don't buy any claims about the number of directories
it has in its database. Many will be out of business, or they
will have changed their forms so the software doesn't work. Almost
none of them had the Google Pagerank claimed either (mostly they
were lower). Keeping a software program like this up to date
is difficult to say the least. I don't know if they are claiming
200 or 400 now, but at the moment we have about 130 directories
programmed into it that work.
I don't expect to find any other submitter that will work
any better. Just think for a moment about what they have to do,
and you can see that they will never work perfectly. They have
to determine how to fill in fields that come in many forms. What
are the chances that a program can do this consistently with
inconsistent forms?
They have to somehow guess which category to put your article
in. Okay, you choose one, but if you say "outdoors"
and there is no category called "outdoors" in 79 of
the 130 directories, what is happening in those cases? I don't
have an answer for you, and if I had to take the time to find
out, I might be even more convinced at how poorly these things
really work.
You insert an article description, and then the program is
supposed to somehow make that work with all the various directories
- each of which have their own rules. Okay, ours has two description
boxes, one for a long description and one for a short one - as
though that solves the problem.
Anyhow, we use it because for a one-time investment of under
a hundred dollars it is a way to get a lot more articles out
there relatively efficiently. Don't believe the claims any of
them make. They are based on how they would like it to work instead
of the reality. But if you want an efficient tool and you have
patience for technical work (setting it up), I sort of recommend
submission software (and yes Article Submitter Pro is better
than the first one I tried).
Continues here... Article
Writing Software
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
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