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  available promise that they can help you get more visitors to your website, build lots of backlinks for better rankings in Google search results, write more and/or better content, add thousands of followers to your twitter account and much more.

Sadly, 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 true for most sales-pages I’ve encountered.

Here’s an overview over the types of online marketing programs available and a summary of what they can do for you:

Article Submitters:
Article submitters are usually targeted 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 can be very useful for getting more exposure for your articles and also for gaining backlinks to your website.

Article submission software is definitely worth it if you write many articles. For maximum effect, check to see that the program includes automated registration to the article directories, automated email verification and basic article spinning features.

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 (typically they claim to submit to thousands of them) and website directories (websites featuring nothing but grouped links to other websites).

In my experience, this type of service is almost never worth it’s price. It’s not much use to you if your website is submitted to some unknown search engine in Lithuania and links from online directories are relatively worthless (with the exception of the DMOZ and Yahoo directories).

Social Bookmarking Tools:
Automatic social bookmarking programs submit any websites you choose to lots of social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Mister-Wong, delicious, reddit and many others. The software signs up, logs in and submits your bookmarks on autopilot 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 buy a program like this, make sure there are good instructions (documentation or video tutorials) offered along with the software.

Competition Analysis Software:
Website analysis programs come in many shapes and sizes. Usually, they allow you to examine any webpage you want, in detail. For instance, they might show you how many backlinks a website has, where those backlinks 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 enter 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 extremely useful 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 program.

Keyword Research Tools:
These programs 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 article. 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 simpler and so paying for it can be worth it (if the tool is a good one.

Other Automation Software:
You can buy automation tools for practically everything. From simple little things that send a tweet out automatically, every time you write a new post on your blog to all-in-one systems that can (or at least claim that they can) practically build entire websites and campaigns for you, from scratch, including content creation and backlink building.

Using tools like these, it is hard to know in advance if they will be worth it. 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. As an example, if you use a program for automating twitter-updates and never post tweets you actually composed yourself, don’t expect your twitter profile to be particularly popular.

Of course, there are many nuances and overlaps among the various online marketing tools available and I can’t describe them all in detail in just one 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 be sure of if a product is worth it and learn exactly how you can make the best use of it, it’s best if you find a reliable review and perhaps some useful tutorials for every individual product.

Tags: internet marketing products, online marketing, website analysis tools

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 30th, 2011 at 5:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.