If you distribute articles and press releases online to market yourself, your clients, or your employer, you know how valuable doing so can be. Articles attract people to your website, products or services and they build credibility for you, the client, or the company.

Article marketing is my number one (free) publicity tactic and it’s a natural fit for writers. It hones skills, showcases talents, and grants a byline without waiting for approval from an editor. By writing and distributing good, informative articles that include a simple resource box, I attract people to my websites, introduce potential clients to my writing and consulting services, sell books, and invite aspiring writers to sign up for the Monday Muse. I own several websites and I use article marketing to promote all of them.

I spend a lot of time writing my articles, and I spend a lot MORE time uploading them to dozens (and dozens) of article databanks every week. During one of my increasingly frequent complaint sessions to my husband about how time consuming this is, he said, “Get submission software.” Although I often have to be dragged kicking and screaming into learning new software, if it can do what I want it to do, I’m willing to learn it.

This past week I started my investigation. Like any software, there are free ones, cheap ones, and expensive ones. All promise to get the job done. All have compelling reasons to choose their software. After reviewing their content pages and poking around in forums to find out what others were saying, I settled on trying two different article submission softwares; one is free and one has a free trial (I love try-before-you-buy options!). Both look easy to use and understand.

I’ll be spending this week trying both of them out and will give you my findings in next week’s Muse. Article marketing is a great way for any writer to get his/her name out into the universe. If there’s a better way to do it, I want to know about it and share it with all of you. Stay tuned!

If you’d like to join me in trying out these article submission softwares, you can get them here:

The free software is Viral Submitter.

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

Let me know your thoughts and input by end of day Friday, March 5, so I can share them with my subscribers. And, if you use or find another submitter software that you think is worth taking a look at, please let me know.