Article announcer review
- worth the investment ?

Article Announcer from Jason Potash is a software application to make it easier to submit to article directories, but is it value for money ?

Well if it can do all this, it could it be worth the required cash investment.

As a former user of Ezine Announcer, Jason Potash's former product I was keen to review Article Announcer to see what advantages it would have. However I was a little put off by the $379 price tag when compared to Ezine Announcer which was a mere $69.

I also did not want or need the accompanying 2 CD tutorials, the John Reese audio instructions or the training guide. After several weeks of negotiation I was able to secure a full copy of just the Article Announcer software (V1.0.2.0) at a reduced price.

Article Announcer is not normally sold as a product without all the training material, so don't expect to be able to buy it like I did.

Article Announcer - Ease of use
As a frequent author of articles and user of Ezine Announcer I could not avoid making some comparisons between Ezine Announcer (EA) and Article Announcer (AA). In both software applications you need to set-up your personal information often required when submitting to article directories.

You then add an article to the software along with resource box details, keywords, article description (abstract) and any additional information you want to record. Like EA, Article Announcer has a list of directory sites in its database to which you can submit articles.

After ticking boxes by each listing, the software will go down the list of sites and submit your article to each web site form one at a time. However this is not a hands free submission process, you can't just click a button and submit to directories automatically. You have to go to each site one at a time and submit your article.

Like EA Article Announcer has an automated form filler built into the software which speeds up the process of article submission. The software brings up the submit article page or login page of each directory site within its own browser window.

The Article Announcer software was easy to use and relatively quick to set up.

Where a login and password are required for submitting an article the software has a feature to save this information, although I did not find this feature worked at all well.

The article directory database version 2.1, contained quite a number of outdated entries. I was expecting the database to be kept up to date by being able to download updates, but in 2 months of use no database update was available, despite the fact it needed an update.

A database update was made available with the release of version 2.0 of Article Announcer which after install provided a database version 3.1 which was immediately updated to version 3.3. This corrected most, but not all the out of date entries discovered in the earlier database version supplied with the original product.

The Article Announcer documentation was adequate although not up to date with added features and still not up to date with the release of Version 2 of Article Announcer.

On some submission sites it was clear that the auto form filling feature did not work and it was necessary to copy the required information into each form field manually. However such sites were in the minority.

There were frustrating problems previewing articles and making changes, since when the web form field was reloaded the Article Announcer software would pre-fill the web form fields with its original article data. This would over write any changes made to the article during the preview process. A means to over ride Article Announcer from automatically filling in the web page submission forms needs to be included.

Further problems were experienced with Article Announcer automatically recording web sites as submitted to, when in actual fact they were not.

This occurred frequently when a site could not be submitted to due to one problem or another and by simply moving to the next site. Article Announcer assumed a successful submission, which was not the case.

The software has a skip site feature, but on occasions I found when using this that the software would still incorrectly assume a successful submission had been made.

Whilst this might seem a minor shortfall it's not when you consider that it's not possible to change the information it records about whether a site has been submitted to or not.

Article Announcer records the last date a submission was made to an article directory but not the date a particular article was submitted. For example if you submit an article to a directory it records the date you submitted. If you submit another article the next day or week it replaces the previous date with the new one, so with the passage of time you have no idea when previous article titles were submitted.

This is not a short coming that exists in Ezine Announcer where it's possible to easily see the date when each and every article was submitted and to which directory sites.

In Version 2 of Article Announcer in addition to the database update a few additional features have been added.

One useful feature is an update link stats button that enables you to obtain the back links for each article on Google, Yahoo and MSN and displays the results alongside each article. A dated history of link status is also available. Each article can also now be formatted in an HTML version as well as Formatted and Non formatted versions.

This review concludes at article announcer - testing product claims

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