A Good Time is Blog Time

An effective article marketing strategy is widely considered to be one of the best methods for creating multiple back links to your blogs or websites, improving the page rank of your sites and subsequently attracting visitors to your sites.

To submit your article to multiple article directories however can be a very time consuming process particularly if you are trying to do everything manually i.e. finding article directories, registering with those directories, copying and pasting your article information to the individual directories and trying to keep a record of what and where you have posted your articles so that you do not accidentally get labeled as a spam submitter by inadvertently re-submitting to the same sites with the same information.

So what is the answer to these problems, in a word it is finding an using a reliable article submission software program that addresses these issues and provides you with the ability to quickly and effectively post your articles to multiple directories, in other words a reliable directory submission software package.

To this end I have recently purchased and been using Article Submitter Pro and have been evaluating it from an ease of use perspective and a reliability perspective. Now you can find out the good the bad and the ugly about Article Submitter Pro as an article submission tool.

First of all you should know that there are a lot of article submission software programs on the market but many of them require you to make an ongoing monthly payment indefinitely, the going rate varies but typically the cheapest you will find costs around $47 per month and the charge is applied whether you are posting articles or not. Article Submitter Pro is a one off payment and you are done, so you very quickly recoup the initial cost versus a monthly program.

One feature that is often promoted is the ability to post your articles in a fully automated manner, what they don’t tell you however is that in order to do that the directories being submitted to really need their protocols set up perfectly and also need to be offering the exact category you are submitting to, otherwise the submission process will either fail or simply post your article to the wrong category. It is for this reason that Article Submitter Pro is operated as a semi-automatic program that requires you as the user to select the correct category in the directory you are submitting to and gives you the option to review your articles to ensure they are properly configured with your resource links in place. This helps to ensure that your articles actually get accepted and published.

What Article Submitter Pro does well

• You can add all the information required by the article directories for registration into the program template, includes user name, password, email address, telephone number etc.etc.
• You can create templates for multiple authors
• You can place copies of all your articles in a directory held by the program ready for submission, assign multiple titles on a per article basis and include your keywords for the article
• You can create multiple resource boxes which can be selected as appropriate to accompany your articles when submitting
• You can select submission directories by Page Rank, favorites or niche
• You can access all your article submission data from the submission screen to make changes as you go should you spot a problem

What I have described above is the basic functionality of the program, if you take care when entering all your personal details and setting up the various data sources as described, you will find that the process of registering with the directories and submitting articles will go a lot more smoothly. Remember when you start submitting things will go relatively quickly so the last thing you want is to find you have made an error setting up the records, not all the directories give you the opportunity to edit or even delete the articles once submitted so getting the data right in the first place is very important.

For the vast majority of the directories the program will automatically populate the registration form, you may need to manually complete the odd field but this part works quite well. There will be some directories where this does not work and you have no option but to fill the form in manually. I would say though with over 1400 directories listed to choose from, if you come across ones that do not populate automatically you can decide whether you really need that directory or not because there will also be a good chance that the article fields will not populate when you click post article, this is the one click function that fills the article form. You can’t remove the directory from the listing but you can choose not to register it as a favorite so you know there is a problem with it.

There is a fall back option for when an article doesn’t post and that is a ‘submit if needed’ drop down list. What you do is to select the category you want to post from a drop down menu, title, article summary etc., this places the content on the clipboard so you can then click in the relevant form field and paste using ‘Ctrl+V’ or right click and paste, this really does work surprisingly well and you can populate the form very quickly using this method. It’s obviously not as good as the one click post article option which would be your first choice but if you were keen to use the directory it is an acceptable means for proceeding.

So what I would say is that once you have registered with all the directories, posting articles really does become quite quick especially with the one click post article option. If it doesn’t, remember that this is because protocols have not been adhered to and it is not the fault of the program, also because you have some involvement you can sort out minor problems using the tools available.

In summary, the greatest effort comes with creating all the article files, registering with the different directories and learning to use the program. There is a good user manual which it is essential that you read and the support for the program is also very good, they normally respond very quickly to problems reported even if, as if often the case, it has been a question of not reading instructions properly.

The not so good for Article Submitter Pro

Being a semi-automatic process does mean there will be some involvement required from yourself and the more articles you have to post the more involvement there will be, just no getting away from that I am afraid. That said when you are posting articles as and when you create them and have completed most of the directory registrations, things are not nearly so intense and the process feels much slicker. My main problem was that I had created a lot of articles and due to the lack of an appropriate submission tool or subscribing to an article submission service, I had created a backlog of submissions to make. Under those circumstances a fully automated option sounds attractive but not when you consider the potential for placing them in the wrong categories or not getting them registered and published, sometimes there is no option other than making a little bit of effort.

The peripheral functions of the program in my opinion do not work as well as the core functions of article submission, e.g. the social site submission does work relatively well, but many of the programs and directories are quite awkward to use and the automatic functions do not seem to work quite as smoothly as the article submitter. The programming work is an ongoing process and therefore subject to improvement and once you have successfully registered with the sites, you are able to write out a short description of the link you are submitting, add keywords, the title and the URL then work quite quickly through the ones that do function, so it does have some value even if a little more patience is required. Social sites are more diverse in nature with a lot more variants of the support programs which might be why it is more difficult to interface smoothly.

Some of the tools in the program toolbox I found did not work as well as I would have liked, I had problems with the backup function and in the end just created my own zip file to make sure all the data that I created was protected. I also had problems with the article grabber function and think it would actually be easier just to use standard cut and paste tools.

It is possible that I just need to revisit the functions and learn to use them better but for the moment I remain out to court on these aspects of the program. Another minor problem I encountered of my own making was when I selected a password that included some odd characters and found out later that not all the directories would accept these characters which caused me a bit of grief, so I would stick to passwords that are straight alpha numeric to make sure you don’t have a similar problem. The program does save your password details if you follow the instructions but when you are first registering you don’t really want to type the password in manually for the sake of not using odd characters.

I have not used the email submission part of the program yet but it does look quite straightforward and easy to use and I am sure I will get to it eventually, when I do I will report on performance, I will do likewise for the Social Site Submission should I discover it is a case of learning to use it better.

Bottom line is that this program is far superior to posting articles manually, the core functions once you have gone through the initial set up stages and learning curve work well and overall I am very glad I bought the program, I believe it has already saved me hours and hours of time. I particularly liked the fact that I could buy the program outright and did not have to commit to an ongoing monthly payment and although not perfect, the core function is very good and I have yet to find a software program that does work perfectly.

You can opt to take the program for an initial 7 day trial period and if you do I would recommend that you carefully read the user instructions before starting to use the program, this will save you quite a bit of time and effort.

Note, if you think that someone has taken and re-used your articles without permission you can report it to Google and have their site removed from the Google index. The guidelines for reporting plagiarism are here.