As I promised in last week’s post, I am going to give you my quick assessment of the two article submission software products I mentioned and vowed to try: one free and one via a free trial.

As a reminder, article marketing is my favorite way to get my name out into the world and attract both subscribers and clients to my websites and services. In fact, some of you probably came to this eZine because of an article I wrote and placed in an article databank. The downside is that submitting articles manually is VERY time consuming, especially with dozens and dozens of article sites available. It can take days (literally) and is often pushed to a lower priority if I’m working on quick turn projects.

After investigating some of the more publicized article submission software products, I settled on two of them to try this past week: Viral Submitter, a free product, and SubmitEaze, a reasonably-priced product with a try-before-you-buy free trial.

I’ll start with Viral Submitter since it will be a quick assessment. The verdict: “I don’t know.” After installing the software, I received an error message saying I needed “.NET Framework” in order for the program to run. Not wanting to immediately spend the time to fix that glitch, I decided to move on to the next software and come back to this again next week. I am adamant about trying out Viral Submitter because it is one of very few that claim to submit press releases—a feature I could use to add significant value to work I do for some of my clients.

SubmitEaze: “Impressed.” The free trial allows a limited number of submissions, but enough to show-and-tell its benefits. The video demos help get you up and running in a short amount of time. Admittedly, I needed to watch them a couple of times before I was able to fully capture the process, but the speed of submission is measured in mere minutes. Two things I consider most impressive are:

1. The software is semi-automatic; it doesn’t just blast your information into cyberspace. Many article sites require that you verify your registration. If you don’t verify, your article will be rejected. Completely automated software cannot detect this verification requirement. This software can.
2. Report generation. With a sophisticated reporting capability, you can track when and where your articles have been submitted, including other beneficial information like view counts. This is a great feature whether you are accountable to a client or want to track where your traffic is coming from on your own site.

I will continue using SubmitEaze in its trial form until I am able to fix the glitch I have with Viral Submitter so I can better compare the two.

If you distribute articles and press releases online to market yourself, your clients, or your employer, I encourage you to join me in trying these software programs. With free trials, you have nothing to lose and a lot of wasted time to eliminate!

I value your experience and opinions and hope you’ll send me your comments about working with them—both the pros and the cons. Download from here:

The free software is Viral Submitter.

The try-before-you-buy software is SubmitEaze.