Article Submitter – Review

Writing articles is an essential tool for the majority of Internet marketers. Whether you are using them for your own blog, submitting articles to high-ranking directories for some good, old article marketing or just using them as part of your link-building strategy, there’s almost no way around writing articles. Article Submitter (made by Brad Callen) is a piece of software that allows you to submit articles to many directories with just a few clicks. In today’s review, I’ll be taking a look at what the free version of this software has to offer.

Overview

The free version of the Article Submitter is not time-limited and there is no catch involved. However, it could be described as a limited-functionality version. There are two paid versions, called Article Submitter Gold and Article Submitter Platinum, that offer more features and more directories to submit to.

What’s It About?

When you submit an article to an article directory like Ezinearticles or Articlesbase, that content is meant for repurposing. It often happens that your article gets picked up and republished by some blogs, for example. Since you get a new backlink (the one you get to place in your “bio box” or “resource box”) each time that your article is republished, this is great for improving your website’s pagerank.

To get more links, you can simply submit your article to more than one directory. Since you have the copyright to the article and it’s meant for repurposing, there’s no reason not to (no, not even duplicate content). The only problem is that you have to register for each directory, navigate to each one in your browser, log in, copy and paste your article and then submit. This takes a lot of time.

Article Submitter simply aims to make this process easier and quicker.

Some Screenshots

Here’s what you see when you launch the Article Submitter:

As you can see, there is a list of directories on the top frame (a total of 77 directories in the free version, at the time of writing this) and a browser window in the frame below. When you double-click one of the directories listed in the top frame, it opens up in the browser window below.

Article Submitter will then fill in all of the fields in the forms, if possible. You pre-enter your article title, description, tags, the article itself as well as the resource-box, links and a category in this “Add Article” window:

There are several tabs for easier navigation and for your article description, body and bio box, there are separate fields where you can enter HTML and non-HTML versions of the texts. Article Submitter will automatically submit the non-HTML versions to all directories that don’t allow HTML input.

The same principle applies to login and registration:

You simply enter your Username Password email address, etc. and Article Submitter will auto-fill the directories’ login screens. If you want to submit to a directory where you aren’t registered yet, you can manually navigate to the “Register” or “Sign-in” page and Article Submitter will fill out all of the necessary information for your registration. All that’s left for your to do is to tick a box, agreeing to the terms of service and sometimes solve a Captcha. Then, you will receive an email and once you’ve confirmed it, you’ll be ready to log in and submit your article.

This only applies to the first time you visit each of the directories. Once you have registered, the log in and submission process becomes much faster.

Does It Work?

The big question is, of course, what it’s like to actually work with the software and if the submissions work smoothly. The most time-consuming task you will face when starting out with the Article Submitter is that first round of registering.

I suggest doing this in bulk for all of the directories. Make sure to open a new e-mail account, just for these article-based mails. You’ll get a ton of mails, even just from the sign-up process alone. Once you’ve done all of the registrations, go to your inbox and confirm them all. This whole thing takes quite a lot of time, but once it’s done, you’ll never have to do it again.

After the registrations are done, each article submission will require only a few clicks. Sometimes you need to select a more suitable category manually (about 30% of the times I tested) and sometimes you need to tick a “agree to TOS” box. Apart from that, I found that the Article Submitter is spot on with the auto-filling.

So, yes, it does work and quite well, at that. The only problem I have with it, is that it still takes quite some time to do dozens of submissions. Nowhere near as long as it would take to do them manually, but waiting for each directory to load so that you can check the form and click submit gets quite boring, quickly. Realistically, don’t expect that you will submit each one of your articles to all of the 77 directories available. Pick your favourite dozen or so among the directories that have good traffic rankings and submit to those.

One thing that I really miss in Article Submitter is an option to spin or rotate your link’s anchor text. As it is, every single article will backlink to a page or website of your choosing using the exact same anchor text. If you do lots of submissions, this could raise a red flag for search engines because it doesn’t look natural when you get all these identical links.

Ratings

Spam-Factor

It’s too early to rate the spam-factor. So far, I haven’t been flooded with emails, which is a good sign. I want to give it a few weeks before I make a final verdict, however.

Scam-Scale

Not much scammyness to be detected, here. There are really only two factors:

1. The pitch page clearly states that you’ll be able to submit articles to 374 directories. Only once you’ve downloaded the program do you learn that the free version is limited to 77 directories.
2. There is an instant upsell, once you sign up for the free version. It’s what I’d describe as an honest upsell, though. The second pitch page simply promotes the two paid versions of the Article Submitter, which have more features. I’m not rating this as particularly scammy because there’s none of that “discover the real secret!” bullcrap going on and the products offered are actually very reasonably priced.

So, I give it a very good two out of five on the scam-scale.

Overall Rating

The free version of the article submitter does, what it’s supposed to do: It submits your articles to lots of directories semi-automatically. The software is very easy to use and I was impressed with how well it auto-filled all of the forms for each directory (including the categories).

The only problems are that it still requires human input and there are no options for spinning the text or at least rotating titles and resource box info. So, while it makes article submission a lot faster than you could ever do it manually, it’s still tedious to submit to more than a dozen or so directories and you might still have to do some manual tweaking.

A big plus is that it’s free. So, go ahead and give it a try. If you don’t like it for some reason, you’ve lost nothing.

This is for you if:

• You do article marketing / bum marketing
• You would like to use articles for link-building purposes
• You would like to submit your articles to more directories, but can’t be bothered because it’s taking too much time
• You want to make article submission easier, but don’t want to spend money

This is not for you if:

• Articles are in no way a part of your Internet marketing strategy
• You are looking for a fully automatic solution (in that case, you might want to give the Platinum version a try – or wait for some of my upcoming reviews)

Conclusion

The Article Submitter is a very useful tool for anyone using articles to build links or direct traffic to their websites. Best of all, it’s free. So just give it a try and see for yourself, if you like it.

One thing I can tell you is that I don’t see myself going back to manually submitting articles to multiple directories anytime soon.

Click here to find the free version of the Article Submitter.

About Shane

I'm Shane Melaugh and I'm the guy writing most of the posts on this blog. My goal is to provide you with useful, straight-forward advice about online marketing and SEO and share my enthusiasm for entrepreneurship with you.