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 Internet marketing products out there claim that they can help you drive traffic to your site, help you create lots of backlinks for better rankings in search results, write more and/or better content, add hundreds of followers to your twitter account and much more.

Sadly, the sales-pages for these programs 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 what it’s been like in my experience.

That’s why I decided to do a quick overview of what kinds of tools are most commonly available and whether or not they are worth buying.

Article Distribution Software:
These programs are mostly 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 definitelyworth it if you write frequently enough. To make the most of it, make sure that the program includes automatic registration to the article directories, automatic email verification and basic article spinning functionality.

Directory or Search Engine Submission:
Directory and search engine submissions are available 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 online directories (websites consisting of categorized 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 homepage is submitted to some obscure search engine in Lithuania and links from online directories are relatively worthless (with the exception of some high-authority ones like Yahoo and DMOZ).

Bookmarking Tools:
Automatic social bookmarking programs submit any websites you choose to lots of social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Backflip, del.icio.us, reddit and many more. The software signs up, logs in and submits your bookmarks on autopilot and can save a lot of time.

Social bookmarking software is 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 closed. So, if you decide to purchase a program like this, make sure there is some good guidance (documentation or video tutorials) offered along with the software.

Competition Analysis Software:
Website analysis programs come in many shapes and sizes. Usually, they enable you to analyze any website you coose, in detail. 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 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.

This type of software is invaluable to an online marketer, in my opinion. I would not even consider into a new market before completing some extensive research with such a program.

Keyword Research Software:
These are often similar to, or part of the same product as the analysis 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 to narrow the search down and find your optimal keyword.
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 much easier and so paying for it can be justified, if it’s good enough.

General Automation Tools:
You can find automation software for practically everything. From simple little things that send a tweet out automatically, every time you publish a new post to your blog to all-in-one systems that run an entire marketing campaign for you and automatically post content even adding links and images, there’s hardly an affiliate marketing related job you couldn’t find an automation tool for.

Utilizing tools like these, it is hard to tell in advance if they are really any good. Keep in mind 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 practically never send tweets you actually composed yourself, don’t expect your twitter profile to be terribly popular.

Of course, there are a lot of 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 program is worth what it costs and learn how you can make the best use of it, you should try to find a reliable review and some useful tutorials for every individual program.

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