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Whether you run a blog in your free time, do some online marketing on the side or are a full-time web marketer, you have probably come across several offers for products and software claiming to help you.

Many Internet marketing products out there claim that they can help you drive traffic to your site, generate tons of backlinks to your site for better rankings in Google, support you in writing more content (or even getting content automatically), add countless followers to your twitter account and much more.

Annoyingly, the sales-pitches for these products are usually full of hype and almost devoid of any real information. The main purpose is to get you interested and excited so that you’ll hit that “order now!” button – too bad if it was information you were looking for. At least, that’s true for most sales-pages I’ve encountered.

That’s why I decided to make this overview of what kinds of tools are most commonly available and whether or not they are worth buying.

Article Submission Software:
These tools are generally aimed at article marketers. What these programs do is log into lots of different online article directories and submit your article to each of them. The more directories your articles are posted to, the more backlinks you get and the more exposure your writing gets online.

A good article submitter is definitelyworth it if you you are a determined article marketer. To make the most of it, make sure that the software includes automated registration to the article directories, automated email confirmation and basic article spinning features.

Directory or Search Engine Submission Software:
Directory and search engine submissions are available as a software package or as a service. What this does is submit your website URL to lots of different search engines (often, they submit to hundreds or even thousands) and website directories (websites consisting of categorized links to other websites).

In my opinion, this type of service is usually not worth the money. There’s not much benefit in it for you if your site is submitted to some unknown search engine in Lithuania and links from directories are mostly worthless (with the exception of the DMOZ and Yahoo directories).

Social Bookmarking Software:
Automatic social bookmarking programs submit any websites you choose to lots of social-bookmarking sites like Digg, Mister-Wong, Diigo, Mixx and many more. The software automates the task of signing up, logging in and submitting your bookmarks and can save a lot of time.

These programs are generally good, but only if you use them the right way. If you simply use them to spam all of your pages to as many sites as possible, you’ll quickly see your accounts closed. So, if you decide to purchase a program like this, make sure there are good instructions (documentation or video tutorials) offered along with the software.

Competition Analysis Software:
Website analysis programs come in many shapes and sizes. Generally, they allow you to analyze any website you want, in-depth. For example, they might show you how many backlinks a site has, where those links are coming from, how many of it’s pages are indexed in Google and so on.

The point of all this is to give you the ability you to estimate your competitor’s strength before you enter a new market. You can find out in detail what a page has going for it and why it’s ranking well and with that information you can see what you need to do to outperform that page.

This type of software is essential to an online marketer, in my opinion. I would never move into a new niche without having spent some time analyzing my competition with such a tool.

Keyword Research Software:
These are often similar to, or part of the same product as the analysis tools mentioned above. The purpose of such a program is to help you find an ideal keyword to target with a new website or article. You can see the number of searches, results and competing pages there are for any given keyword and sort the results according to your needs.
It isn’t absolutely necessary to spend money on a keyword research tool, since you can use the one offered by Google for free. However, a good tool can make research a lot easier and so paying for it can be worth it (if the tool is a good one.

General Automation Tools:
You can purchase automation software for practically everything. From simple little scripts that send a tweet out automatically, every time you publish a new post to your blog to entire systems that run an entire blog-network for you and automatically post content and add links and images, there’s hardly an Internet marketing related job you couldn’t find an automation tool for.

With tools like these, it’s hard to know in advance if they are really any good. Remember that the success-rate will never be 100% with such bots and that your results will always look automated, at least to some extent. For example, if you use a program for automating twitter-updates but practically never post tweets that you actually write yourself, don’t expect your twitter profile to be particularly popular.

Of course, there are a lot of nuances and overlaps among the different online marketing tools available and I can’t cover everything in this article. However, I hope you can now see through the hype on sales-letters a bit more easily and get an idea of what’s behind it all.

To really be sure of if a program is worth the money and learn exactly how you can get the most out of it, you need to find a trustworthy review and perhaps some helpful tutorials for every individual product.