ArticleBlaster Article Post Robot - When Marketing Ingenuity Meets Automation

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Article Title: Article Post Robot - When Marketing Ingenuity Meets Automation
Author: Stephen Carter
Word Count: 1229
Keywords: article submission software, article marketing, article post robot
Contact Email Address: articles@randommouse.com
Website: http://www.randommouse.com
Category: Article Marketing, Online Marketing, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Home Business
Description: Learn how one piece of automation software is contributing to the article publishing revolution, and whether it can live up to its promise of marketing utopia.

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Title: Article Post Robot - When Marketing Ingenuity Meets Automation


Article Marketing, the practice of submitting articles to
article directories and ezine mail lists to gain link exposure,
is going through an explosive phase in popularity right now.

Contributing to this trend is the emergence of automated
article submission software that allows authors to send their
articles to hundreds of article publishers at the push of a
button.

The promise for small businesses and home-based entrepreneurs
looking to increase marketing channels should be immediately
obvious. If you use article marketing to get your message out
you already know that the bottleneck is not in the writing of
your well thought out and compelling articles.

No, it is in the submission process. The repetitive and
dizzying experience of filling in article submission forms is
perhaps the biggest turn off for aspiring article marketers.

This might be why the prospect of no longer having to submit
articles manually causes something like fireworks in the brain
stem. Oh happy days are cometh to the article marketer!

Or am I just getting caught up in the hype?

Recently I obtained one of these automated article submission
programs and put it to the test. Read on to find out the pros
and cons of using Article Post Robot, one of the more widely
advertised article submission programs on the market.

The first benefit you gain from trying out Article Post Robot
is a risk-free 7-day trial period. I was able to download the
full-featured software and start my trial with a key supplied
upon request from the developer, David Tang.

The next step, after familiarizing myself with the program, was
to register on the various article submission sites to acquire
login credentials and, for those sites run by Article Dashboard
(a popular application designed to run an article directory), a
pen name.

This proved to be somewhat tedious, but I wanted to register
with as many sites as possible. Article Post Robot offers
nearly 300 potential sites to target, of which I found about
200 to be general enough to suit my needs (for example, unless
it happens to be right up your alley, you too will likely not
need to register with that directory devoted to Dog Articles!).

I discovered soon enough that a number of article directories
listed in Article Post Robot were no longer in existence, or
revealed their transitory nature with an ACCOUNT SUSPENDED
notice. Clearly there are good and bad neighborhoods in article
directory land, but it is not easy to tell which is which
unless the site itself happens to be out of commission.

So, first lesson, take the value of your article submissions
with a grain of salt. What looks like a valuable publication
venue might be gone tomorrow. To his credit, the developer of
Article Post Robot, asked me for the list of non-functioning
sites when I alerted him to the problem.

Now, as a software developer myself, I happen to be fairly
critical of other software applications. So, right off the bat
I can tell you that had I developed Article Post Robot myself,
it would have come out a little different.

Despite this, I think that David has done a very good job
putting together Article Post Robot. It is easy to use, though
maybe a little rough around the edges--which is not surprising
for software less than a year in release.

One of my main gripes with Article Post Robot involves the
currently poorly written user manual. It would help a great
deal if David paid a professional to rewrite it. I suspect that
for the Article Post Robot development team, English is a
second language that has not yet been fully mastered, and it
shows in the manual. That said, with a bit of trial and error,
it is not hard to figure out how to use Article Post Robot.

Like most other people considering automated article submission
software, I purchased Article Post Robot because I want to
submit articles to a large number of article directories, and
the only practical way to do this is to use an automated robot.

Unfortunately, what I find in practice, is that Article Post
Robot fails one critical task in the automated submission
process. It very often does *not* select a sufficiently
suitable article category when it loads the article submission
form, and this rules out--for me, anyway--completely automated
submissions (i.e. hit one button, walk away, and come back when
the article has been submitted to every article site in the
list). Instead I monitor the process manually, which I will
explain in more detail in a moment.

Getting back to the category selection process, which I believe
plays a big role in determining whether or not an article will
be accepted by a given article publisher, Article Post Robot
allows me to select up to 5 possible categories from 5 drop
down menus. Article Post Robot will then attempt to match one
of these selections with the categories it finds on the target
publisher site. You can even type in a keyword for the category
and supposedly Article Post Robot will attempt to match it.

However, I found that typing in "Affiliate Marketing" never
resulted in a category match, even though a good number of
publisher sites do have an Affiliate Marketing category. On the
other hand, the term "Affiliate" did sometimes result in a
match. But not often enough to be reliable. Therefore I
consider Article Post Robot category-matching a feature that
needs a lot more work (though, of course, this issue may be
resolved by the time you read this article).

Because of my lack of confidence in this element of the
software, I choose to allow Article Post Robot to submit to
sites in the "manual submission" mode. What this means is that
Article Post Robot will load the relevant submission forms on
the article sites for me, and it is then up to me to look them
over, tweak anything that is not quite right (like the category
to associate with the article), then submit the form myself.
After this I simply hit the "next site" button and move on.

All told, the manual submission route is still a lot quicker
than going about article submissions without any form of
article submission software, and in itself is worth the price
of the software. However, when David Tang gets the category
selection feature ironed out, I can easily imagine letting
Article Post Robot do all the submissions by itself. I am sure
the owners of article sites will appreciate this extra accuracy
in the process as much as I will.

In addition to the article directory submissions, Article Post
Robot can submit to about 40 sufficiently generic email lists,
and for this I do in fact allow the software to do all the
submissions (which amounts to merely sending out the article in
email format to each of the publishers).

In summary, I like Article Post Robot. I look forward to seeing
some improvements in the areas I have touched upon in this
review, and I expect I will be using the software for some time
to come. Really, if you are at all serious about article
marketing, you will find that looking into an automated
submission solution, such as that offered by Article Post
Robot, is well worth your time.



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Stephen Carter is the developer of Red Queen,
a powerful web-based customer review engine that allows
webmasters to manage customer reviews on their web site.
http://www.randommouse.com/redqueen

He uses Article Post Robot to help promote his business
with article submissions.
http://www.randommouse.com/rms/find/article_post_robot.php
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