As an article marketing evangelist and somewhat of a purist, I am still obligated to try any new article marketing automation and/or article marketing service available in order to guide my community to the “best” products and services. I take it very seriously. I join these programs, pay good money (that I could be using on my kids:), all to make sure that my members aren’t being taken for a ride. After several months of using some of the “better” article marketing services — this is what I have found.

The better article submission sites and article marketing sites often offer writers the opportunity to create “unique” versions of their articles in an effort to avoid the dreaded article marketing duplicate content penalty. This is usually the feature of their service that they highlight mostly because it justifies the monthly cost of their programs. Other article submission services that only submit your articles to directories and 3rd party websites, usually charge a lot less.

So these are the problems I have found with this distinct article version feature in most programs…

Problem #1
In essence, you are re-writing your first article, chunk by chunk, using their web-based programs — BUT — it takes a very long time to re-write your article using this system. Time that some of us (maybe not all) could have written our own versions of the original article all on our own. For me, I have found that I can re-write my articles with less aggravation without the program.

Problem #2
These article creation software programs don’t always hit the mark, in fact they quite often miss it. After you’ve spent about 25 minutes creating your various new “article chunks” you’ll be surprised to see just how little the variations are between your articles. Little enough that you may not end up with as many distinctive versions of your articles as you had hoped. My search engine results for articles I had written with a few of these services showed that. There still were “duplicate results” in my Google search for my articles.

Problem #3
And this is my biggest one, when it comes to article marketing automation, where is the accountability? One thing that has always bothered me about all of the article submission and article marketing services that I have tried over the years, is that you never really know where your articles have been submitted. You never get a true picture of your results. And this is why…

Many of the article marketing services out there submit your articles to about 10 relevant sites, and then to hundreds of blogs that they own and rarely update with relevant information. So your articles do get submitted, but to mostly dead man’s land. The untended blog abyss!

Wrap-Up
Now having said all of that, let me add that many of the services out here designed to do all of your article marketing automation, do what they say. They do submit your articles to more than one publication, and some others even submit distinct versions of those articles, but you must ask yourself — are you willing to pay $27, $37, $67 a month for a service that does this but with all the limitations that I have mentioned above including no tangible way to know where your articles are published?

So this is an open letter to all article marketing automation services: Will you add accountability to your service? Can you show me a list every month of where my articles are published? Can you be a bit more transparent about what relationships you have with other publications, or at least if you are publishing my articles to your own network of blogs – say so.

If you’re up for the challenge, I’m willing to give your service a try, use it for my own business, and recommend it to my community.

Until such time, let the buyer beware…