Driving free traffic to your web site — free traffic that’s really targeted — is the very best thing about article marketing. The second best thing is that it’s easy to get started. The only tool absolutely required is a way to type your article.

However, the only tool required to dig a ditch is a shovel, but if you have a backhoe available shouldn’t you use it? Article marketing can be made even easier by using the right tools. In this article I’m going to cover a few that I’ve found especially useful.

Research Tools

While I think the very best articles come from your personal experience, often there’s a need to do research on a topic to make sure you’re writing information that’s correct and as detailed as it needs to be. While a trip to your local library is a great way to handle this, you can also use the online search engines to gain a lot of knowledge.

The main thing you’re going to have to watch out for is not to take info at face value just because you see it posted on the internet. The sources you should be looking for are universities, research facilities, etc.

A quick way to find a lot of information is to do a search and then scan the first 20-40 listings. Copy the links of any that look interesting and paste them into an editor window. After you have at least a couple dozen possibilities, start down the list and visit each site to see if there’s more knowledge you can add to what you already know.

Writing Tools

You can write with a word processor, but a lot of article directories want a plain text version and word processors can easily add “extended characters” that mess up the formatting. Something like Notepad (Windows) or BBEdit (Mac) will work very well. There are also dedicated programs for article marketers that usually include tools that help make the writing process faster and easier.

Sidebar: I suggest staying away from any article marketing software that says it will “spin” articles. Most of the junk articles you see online come from spinners. The major article directories don’t like spun articles and I don’t know of any human who would want to read one, either.

The other writing tool you need is a dictionary — fortunately, almost every text editor includes a spellcheck feature built-in. It’s your friend, use it. While you can certainly get your point across with spelling errors present, they tend to make you look less credible as an expert on the subject.

Submission Tools

If you’re planning on submitting your articles to many online directories you might want to look at software that can do it automatically. The main problem I’ve seen with such software is it’s not usually very accurate. For example, your article will be submitted with a “generic” category that may not match up with what the article directory offers. That can cause your article to be rejected.

In general, there are only a handful of article directories that make the most difference and submitting manually to those doesn’t take all that long.

Whether you submit automatically or manually, you’ll also want to keep track of which articles are submitted to which directories, and on which date. Keeping a journal of your article marketing efforts will allow you to track your results.

Using the right article marketing tools can mean the difference between a grueling task and one that can be knocked out quickly.

One program that helps you research, write, submit, and track your article marketing is Article Architect. It can make a big difference in your article marketing, so take a look at it at http://ArticleArchitect.com right now.

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