Review of Article Post Robot
Updated in June 2007
A while back I bought some software called Article Announcer and reviewed it on this blog. One of the drawbacks of Article announcer is that it is pretty expensive, costing over $300!
Article Announcer now has a few competitors on the market, one of these being Article Post Robot. I've just used this software to submit my latest article titled How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online. Article Robot is kinder on the wallet and is currently priced at $127. The question is, does it do what it says on the tin? And how does it compare to Article Announcer?
Unlike Article Announcer, Article Post Robot is a downloadable product, so once you've purchased it and your account has been created you can download it instantly. It doesn't come with any fancy videos, audios or polished user guides - there's just an 21 page PDF manual. The manual isn't written in perfect English, but it's pretty straightforward and tells you what you need to know quickly.
The software is easy to install and is supported by Windows 2000 and Windows XP. You'll also need Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher and you have to to download Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. I managed to install everything on my PC without any problems within a couple of minutes.
The User Interface for Article Post Robot is clean and simple and the product is very easy to use. There's a total of 501 Article Directories in the list. Some of the directories don't require a login, but most of the directories do. This is probably the most time consuming part of the article submission process, but is necessary regardless of whether you are using software or submitting manually. The good news is that you only need to do this once, for your first article. Article Post Robot lets you view the list of article directories and sort them by page rank or alphabetically. You can right click on any of the article directories and add login details or visit the directory in a new browser window. You can choose to select all 501 directories or manually select a subset of the directories. I decided to start with the directories that didn't require a login.
The next step is to enter the information about the article itself. I clicked on the Article Options tab and enter the article title, sub title, keywords, summary and choose up to 5 possible categories in order of preference. I then clicked on the Article Content tab and pasted in the actual content of the article in text format. Finally I clicked on the Author Options tab and entered my author resource box. You have the option of entering as many author resource boxes as you like, which is very useful.
Once you've set all the article details up and chosen which article directories you want to submit to you need to decide whether you want to submit to the directories manually or automatically. Being a bit cautious, I decided to submit manually to a few directories first. This was very straightforward - I just clicked on the "Next Article Site" button and Article Post Robot automatically filled out the article submission form with details of the article title, keywords, summary, article body, author resource box and catogory. Manual submission gives you that extra bit of control over your submission and allows you to change the category and check that all the details are correct before pressing the submit button to submit your article. Once I've submitted the article I just need to hit the "Next Article Site" button again and watch while Article Post Robot fills out the next article submission form. Everything worked perfectly and I didn't need to change any of the details that Article Post Robot filled out for me.
After about 15 manual submissions I decided to trust Article Post Robot to submit automatically for me. I stopped the manual submission and checked the automatic submission box. I then left my computer, made a cup of tea and watched some TV while Article Post Robot worked hard submitting my articles to the remaining directories. Once it was finished I just needed to check the log file to make sure that my article had been submitted to all the directories successfully.
The automatic posting feature of Article Post Robot is excellent! Unless you need the control to select a very precise category or to modify some of the fields manually there is no need to use the manual submission.
If you want to increase your article marketing success by submitting slightly different versions of each article, then Article Post Robot has a great new feature that helps with this. It allows you to have multiple versions of your article title, article summary, artice and resource box.
It also lets you have one copy of your article or resource box and put a choice of different words between curly brackets. Article Post Robot will randomly choose one of the words between each of the brackets {{{ and }}}.
A few days after I submitter my article a quick search in Google for "How to start a blog and make money online" revealed 747 results.
Article Post Robot also has the ability to send your article to article announcement lists and has a list of 53 lists to email your article to. Setting this up just involves adding information about your email server (SMTP) and hitting the start button.
Overall I would highly recommend Article Post Robot. It's easy to setup and use and will save you a huge amount of time when submitting your article to directories.
If you are debating whether to purchase Article Post Robot or Article Announcer, here are a few comparisons:
- Price - Article Post Robot is almost a third of the price of Article Announcer
- Number of Directories - Article Post Robot has around 50% more directories to submit too
- Number of Announcement Lists - Article Post Robot has more than twice the number of Announcement lists
- Number of Ezine Publishers - Article Announcer has the ability to send your article to over 100 ezine publishers. Article Post Robot doesn't have this facility
- Features - Both of these software products have similar kinds of features, but there are a few differentiators. Article Post Robot has an automatic submission feature, whereas Article Announcer doesn't. Article Announcer has the ezine publisher submission feature, whereas Article Post Robot doesn't.
- Ease of Use - I found Article Post Robot slightly easier to use. The automatic posting option also makes it faster.
- Documentation - Article Announcer has better documentation, including videos and a polished user guide. It also comes with extensive audios on article marketing stratigies.
You can find out more about Article Post Robot here.
You can read the review of Article Announcer here.
Labels: Product Reviews, Tools
posted by Suzanne @ 11:17 PM
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