Recently I’ve had a few of my clients ask me if I have any updates about article marketing. As a matter of fact I do!

Article Marketer has been annoying me for years but has always been the best option available, until now. In the last few months, I have tried three completely different article distribution services and hopefully this post can catch everyone up to speed. Here’s what has been bugging me about Article Marketer.

In the last six months, Article Marketer has started taking a lot longer to approve articles than they used to. They are now taking weeks (sometimes over a month) to approve articles and this is obviously not cutting it. If they were the best option, I would still use them, but they aren’t.

They also seem to be annoyed with the fact that I submit a lot of articles. If I submit a bunch, they don’t approve any of them. If I submit one, they often approve it. Apparently my account isn’t unlimited after all, even though I paid for an unlimited account. Again, I could only live with this (and did) if it was the best option (it no longer is).

Since Article Marketer got so bad, I decided to try out some other services. The first one I went to was iSnare (I’m NOT recommending them). I went there first because I had heard about them and I’ll try almost anything once, but I have to say that they weren’t what I wanted to see. Here’s the first thing I saw after I bought the account:

Delays in approval. We are very sorry for the delays in approvals we are trying to sort out problems including support tickets getting lost. We are trying to prioritize the problem in reviews as not to make it worst than it is already. We are hoping for your kind consideration.

The message is dated in August, hahahahahahahaha. Apparently it was harder to fix then they thought. Turns out they take 2-3 weeks to get an article in. If the service was cheaper I could live with this, but iSnare costs $59.99 per month. This is way too much for a service that has known issues – issues that they conveniently don’t disclose until after you’ve given them $59.

They also want articles that are 500+ words which is pretty large.

I then tried two other companies that I was pretty happy with. Unique Article Wizard won the award as the distribution service that I will keep giving my money to. The basic idea of Unique Article Wizard is that you can rewrite each paragraph of your articles so that each publisher gets a version that’s somewhat unique. I don’t know how much value this actually provides, but in my opinion it would have to provide at least some and this should make your links stronger.

What I really loved about Unique Article Wizard is that almost all of my articles go out within 24 hours. Worst case scenario they are going out in 48 hours. This is what I expect from a service that costs $67 per month.

There were a few other things that I really liked about UAW:

• You can submit as many versions of your resource box as you like (think varied anchor text, promotion of multiple pages, etc.).
• They aren’t silly about what they approve. If it’s a good article, it will get approved.
• They submit to tons of blogs, on top of their submissions to article directories.

Right now UAW gets five gold stars and so far I don’t have any issues at all with them.

Article Marketing Automation is the other service I tried that I liked. I’m going to keep paying for their service for now, but I would recommend going with UAW first.

AMA is a good service that doesn’t submit to article directories. They only submit to regular sites and blogs. I like this fact, except their publisher network isn’t huge right now and this means your articles won’t get published on tons of sites. I would expect them to get bigger as time goes on. The articles I submitted got me about 20 links each (I’m sure this depends on the topical content of the articles).

I’m going to keep paying the $47 per month that it costs to have AMA, but I would recommend going with UAW at $67 if you can only afford one of them right now. UAW will give you more bang for your buck, but AMA is a great supplement if you can afford both.

Summary

Article Marketer is getting worse.

iSnare disappointed me.

Unique Article Wizard is the best option out there and I have really liked it.

Article Marketing Automation is an up and comer that’s a great supplement to Unique Article Wizard.