[H318]High Cost Of The Low Price

Writing and submitting articles is a popular way to promote a web site. However it can be very time consuming, so using software or a service to automate the process is key. Article Submitter is a piece of software that is widely available under different names (Article Submitter, My Article Pro, My Article Submitter, and Article Money, to name a few) and at different price levels (anywhere from $15 to $97). With other software costing almost $400 and some services charging $15 just to submit one article, how useful can Article Submitter be?

Article Submitter comes with its own Windows installer which makes the installation process painless. One annoying "feature" is that it only installs a shortcut in the Startup folder which starts Article Submitter every time you start Windows. This shortcut is easy to move to a regular location on the Programs menu.

When you start the program for the first time, you begin by filling in your personal information. Only one user and one resource box is allowed, so if you are submitting articles for multiple sites you have to either install Article Submitter in multiple locations, or change the information each time. The resource box is also very limited in size, about 20 to 25 words.

Next you write your article by filling in text boxes for title, article text, summary and keywords. No advanced word processing features are available here, and no spellchecker.

Then you go to the Websites tab where you select which web sites you want to submit to. There is no information other than the name of the site to help you determine what types of articles each site accepts. The program does not have a feature to update the list of sites and during our testing (in November 2006) we found that 25 of the 138 listed sites no longer existed or no longer accepted article submissions. You can add sites yourself to the list. However, when we tried to delete one of the sites, the program got stuck in an infinite loop.

After you have selected the sites to submit to you go to the Auto Fill tab and click Start. Article Submitter will now bring up each page in an embedded web browser and attempt to fill out each site’s article submission form as best as it can using the information you have entered in the program. The success rate of how many fields are correctly filled out varies from site to site (and you can fine tune this to some extent in the advanced section on the Websites tab), but you typically have to manually fill out or select a few fields, e.g. article category. You also have to press the submit button manually, so the program does not know if you submitted the article or not. Therefore there is no history or record of which sites an article was submitted to.

Many sites require that you register first before you can submit articles. Article Submitter helps you here by keeping track of your login and password. The next time you come to the site Article Submitter fills in the login fields for you. If you are submitting articles today then you are probably already registered with many of the sites. We started from scratch for this review and we spent 3-4 hours to register for all the included sites. This is a task you only have to do once.

The final tab is called Manual Fill and is basically a web browser with a list of URLs for article submission sites. In a few cases the Fill button will successfully fill out some form fields, but mostly this section is aptly named Manual Fill.

In summary Article Submitter, and its private label cousins, are very basic in their features and functionality. If you are just starting out in article marketing $15 will give you a decent introduction to what software can do to help relieve some of the drudgery of the submission process.