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 programs out there claim that they can help you get more visitors to your website, build lots on backlinks for better rankings in search engines, write more and/or better content, add tons of followers to your twitter account and much more.

Annoyingly, the sales-pages 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 do a quick overview of what kind of software is most commonly available and whether or not this kind of thing is worth the money.

Article Submission Software:

This type of software is generally 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.

This type of tool is worth it if you write many articles. To get the most out of it, make sure that the software features automatic registration to the article directories, automatic email confirmation and basic article spinning functionality.

Directory or Search Engine Submission:

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 almost never worth the money. 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 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.

These programs are generally good, but only if used correctly. If you simply use them to spam all of your pages to as many sites as possible, you’ll quickly see your accounts banned. So, if you go for a program like this, make sure this issue is addressed and there is some good guidance (documentation or video tutorials) offered along with the software.

Website Analysis Software:

These kinds of programs come in many shapes and sizes. Generally, they allow you to analyze any website you want in-depth. For example, they might show you how many backlinks a website has, where those links are coming from, how many of it’s pages are indexed on 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.

This type of software is invaluable 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 program.

Keyword Research Tools:

These are often similar or in the same package 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 article. You can see how many searches, results and competing pages there are for any given keyword and filter the results to your needs.

It’s not essential 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 justified if it’s good enough.

General Automation Tools:

You can find automation tools for almost everything. From simple little things that send a tweet out automatically, every time you publish a new post to your blog to complete systems that run an entire blog for you and automatically post content and add links and images, there’s hardly an online marketing related task you couldn’t find an automation tool for.

With tools like these, it’s difficult to tell beforehand, whether they will be worth it. Two things to keep in mind are that the success-rate will never be 100% with such bots and that it will always look  automated, at least to some extent. For example, if you auto-tweet and never send tweets you actually composed yourself, don’t expect your twitter account to be terribly popular.

Of course, there are many nuances and overlaps between the different Internet 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 whether a program is worth it and learn exactly how you can make the best use of it, you need to find a reliable review and some good tutorials for each individual program.

Shane writes Internet marketing product reviews on RichQuickReview.com.

He is an offline and online entrepreneur with a passion for testing, taking things apart and looking under the proverbial hood. On his blog, he writes reviews as well as articles about online marketing related topics.

How do you handle multiple, multiple, multiple ideas for internet marketing that you are interested in?

i am interested in internet marketing, and I have plenty of products and plenty of websites that i want to make to advertise those products for income. How do I handly multiple niche ideas?? It seems like I have too many, but if I try to stay with just one idea, that is so boring and limited to my multi-faceted, multi-idea, entreprenuerial brain. Please help – advice!!

Answer
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