As a first entry on this angelfire property I just recently launched I want to tackle the area of article marketing and how the automation myth - that every web marketer seems to be tempted by in a certain moment of their carrier - could benefit or damage your promotional efforts. So, when it comes to automating the article marketing processes there are basically two areas we need to go to:Article Creation & Article Distribution.
Now, article creation is one area you should definitely keep away from automation - no matter whether is about generating unique articles or spinning existing ones. If you consider you don't have the time or energy to write the articles yourself hire someone to do it. There aer plenty of places where you could find talented writers that will carry the job for you.
When it comes to outsourcing there are basically two alternatives available: you either enroll as a client in a article writing service (accompanied most often by a monthly fee) or you look for writers on your own on freelancing sites like Elance.com, just to give you an example.
No matter your course of action, never take the easy path of buying software packets that deliver "unique" content on a push of a button. As I tried every possible product out there there's one crucial thing I learned: these products work to the degree that you make the commitment to write & rewrite the content on your own; and use their features as tools for easing the production process but never replacing your intellectual creation.
The second pillar of automation in article marketing has to do with article publication. In best case scenario you'll want to distribute your content to hundreds of quality article repositories and do it in a cheap and automated manner. Unfortunately this instrument hasn't been invented yet. Some may argue that an article submission software is the right tool for your needs.
I'm here to tell you that such software don't do such a good job of distributing your content to authority article directories because such places are frequently tweaked on their homepage and submission forms precisely for discouraging automated submissions. So developers are left with a bunch of garbage sites that are for the most part neglected by their webmasters and spammed to death. The sad thing is those places don't receive any human traffic, at least not enough to supply businesses with a sustainable flow of referral traffic.
Your alternatives: you should submit to (at least) the top 10 article directories manually taking the time to carefully format the article and alternatively use an automated software to do mass submission to the other ADs with the aim of getting those article indexed and subsequently getting the backlink to your money site that accompany each piece of content. The second alternative would be that of investing into a monthly membership on syndication services that publish articles to both authority sites (good PR at their homepage and high volume of daily traffic as expressed by the Alexa ranking) and the other couple of hundreds directories for off page optimization reasons (link building).
These few ideas covered in this first post are my own blueprints for doing article marketing. I'm not sure all of you will agree with be but I do encourage you to contradict me and state your own optics on the subject. Either way I hope you found these lines informative and at some degree helpful for your advertising campaigns.