Article writing tools, like Jonathan Leger’s new Instant Article Wizard software have been hitting the market recently, and they sure sound like a good investment. Leger’s software, by far the most popular of the bunch, allows you to hunt for information based on your keywords, and then pick and choose which bits of information you’re going to include in your article. There is also less internet-dependant article software, like Article Architect, which is primarily an organizational, and keyword analyzing tool.
The question is, of course, how good these pieces of software are, and whether or not article writers should use them. I’ve purchased and tested this software for myself, and the results are quite interesting.
The Instant Article Wizard has been getting a lot of praise in the online article writing community, and I can understand why. It basically does automatic research and compiles you keyword-happy articles that you simply need to reword and fit into your own writing style. It does this by beginning with the keyword, and finding sentences from other articles and websites which contain that particular keyword. On occasion, you can pick from a generic sentence that contains your keyword as well. You then pick and choose from these sentences until you have an article that looks decent.
If that sounds like plagiarism, it is. What they don’t make clear with Instant Article Wizard is that you need to spend time rewording the article, and every sentence in that article before you can actually submit it. The software has no check on this, however, and that’s how people get into trouble.
While the sales page and testimonials will praise this software for helping them write articles quickly, I’ve found that it really doesn’t save you any time at all. You spend so much time reading and sorting through all of the sentences that the computer finds, and then rewording them, that any author who is not plagiarizing could write the article faster without the help. Sure, you might need to do a little research for some specific facts, but regardless, this software is not particularly helpful, and with a $67 cost, I do not recommend using it.
The software that I tried which I do recommend is called Article Architect, and it is a completely different beast. This is more of an organizational tool and keyword research tool than an article writer.
The power of this software lies in the article design process that you use to write your articles. You start with an idea about a particular topic, and begin a new project based on that. Then, you use the keyword research tool, which provides data on the number of searches and the number of competitors that you’ll be up against. The idea here is that a relatively high number of searches and a low number of competitors will provide you with an easily found article, and thus more pageviews. The software will suggest keywords and display information about the number of searches, highlighting the ones which it feels are particularly useful. You can then save all of these keywords in a database for use later.
If you want to do a little research, the software has a nice little drag and drop interface for that. Thus, you can gather information from websites which you can use in your articles very quickly.
Once you do that, you need to actually write the article, and there are a lot of helpful things that Article Architect can do to help you with that. First, select the keyword that you wish to target in your article. You can use the headline generator tool to help you pick a catchy title. You simply answer four questions, and it fills in the blanks to about 300 possible titles that you can use. Or, you can simply write your own.
Once you start typing your article, you can use the keyword density analyzer that is built into the software. It will generate, on the fly, information about how often you’re using your keyword of choice, and tell you if the software thinks that it is being over- or under-used. This is a fantastic feature which, if used properly, all but guarantees that your articles will place highly in search engine searches.
Finally, it comes with an semi-automated software submission tool. No more saving your Word Documents into Text format and then copying and pasting. You can simply click a few times and the software will fill in the information for you.
Then, you can also use the software to track the money that you’re making per article and the number of pageviews, so you can see at a glance how popular your articles are, and which categories are generating the most money or pageviews. Article Architect has a feature which lets you input these at your leisure, which is a great way to stay on top of which kinds of articles are working best for you.
All in all, I think everyone who writes articles should give this software a shot. It’s fairly inexpensive as far as these things go at $49.95 (compared to Instant Article Wizard which does less at $67 or Keyword Elite, which has only a single part of this software’s functionality for $99). You can purchase it at this website.
