Article Demon Review

I bought Article Demon as soon as it came out and have given it a thorough test and compared it to its nearest rival Article Marketing Robot.

For those in a hurry, Article Marketing Robot is better for the vast majority of users. Its cheaper, quicker, easier and still gets lots of links. Article Demon is the better product, but only worth the extra time and money if you want to schedule massive amounts of articles to loads of sites and use the project management features.

A Quick Look At the Competition

Magic Article Submitter is bundled with Magic Article Rewriter, so is a good all in one spinner / submitter package. From memory Magic Article rewriter added $29 to the price of the bundle, and the rewriter (spinner) is one of the best around, so the bundle is good quality and good value, but Magic Article Submitter only supports a couple of target platforms (directory scripts), you cannot add new targets to it and it is nowhere near as slick as Article Demon, but, it works just fine.

Article Marketing Robot is around $79, I think you can get it for less with coupons / special offers (I will add some here later). It has 1600 target sites pre loaded and can do pretty much everything that Article Demon can, but its clunky, nastily laid out software, and I am not sure how easily you can add new targets, if at all.

Article Demon “looks” to be the cream of the crop, but is considerably more expensive at $129 with the old line “soon to go up to $197″. If it were $197 I would not have bought it, and would have gone with Article Marketing Robot, but, at $127 I figured it was worth a look.

Article Demon it supports more Article platforms than Magic Article Submitter, and the same platforms as Article Marketing Robot.

One of the features they are promoting is integration with captcha solving services (also a feature of Article Marketing Robot). One thing you need to consider when buying EdwinSoft products with captcha solving integration is that they mark up the price 100%. EdwinSoft effectively get half of your captcha credit. I guess this is no worse than services charging a monthly fee, and it is optional, and it means those that use the software most pay most toward its upkeep, but I still dont like it!

First impressions of this software are good, its pretty slick, as all EdwinSoft products are these days. The layout is very similar to BMD, and anyone that has used that software will be on familliar ground. For newbies, there is a series of high quality training videos to get you started.

The scheduler and other features are pretty much the same as BMD. You get a calendar view of months, highlight days and can add jobs to it for those days. You can then minimise Article Demon to the task bar and it will submit X articles per day as per your instructions.

The category selection (which is very important if you want your stuff approved) looks excellent… more to come on that.

The BIG negative at the moment though is that it only has 100 directory sites pre-loaded, all be it good ones. Magic Article Submitter has over 1000 and its only $29 if you buy it with Magic Article Rewriter. Article Marketing Robot, which is $79 and has 1600 direcotry sites loaded. EdwinSoft have been a bit crap on the target list front, as they are with BMD.

Article Demon does have a bonus of another 200 directories though, Im not sure why these are not pre-loaded. So, you actually get 300 directories with the purchase.

The good news is you can add your own lists of target sites. The import / auto detect feature on Article Demon is excellent. I took raw scrapes from scrapebox using basic footprints from the target article platforms and dumped the raw lists into Article Demon. It auto detected the platform and added them to the database. This is a very powerful feature. I now have 1800 directories loaded with more to come.

When loading up my target sites I hit a problem with ArticleSS, a wordpress plugin that allows it to be used as an article directory. The sites were not being recognised properly. I raised a ticket with EdwinSoft and within two hours got the following reply:

Thank you for your feedback. We have a very advanced plugin system built into Article Demon. It allow us to add new self-added sites right into the core and have it instantly pushed to our users when they restart Article Demon.

As I reply this ticket, the development team have added a new plugin (YOURWORDPRESS-2) into the server and Article Demon is now capable of detecting more variations of WordPress based directories.

Simply restart your copy of AD to download the new plugins.

Now, that is what you call support, and its not just because its a new launch, I have always had good support from EdwinSoft regards BookMarking demon, for example, a captcha problem I found was fixed in around 30 minutes. They are very professional.

Another useful feature of Article Demon which has been carried over from bookmarking demon is the way queues are built. When you create an author account, all the account details for each target site are added to a queue. You can process there and then, or go back and create another account, details for which are again added to the queue. To load accounts onto all 1800+ target sites I am testing takes around 5 minutes, but, this is a lot less time than the full registration proces. It is only when you process the queue that Article Demon goes off and actually registers the accounts, which can be a slow process. The advantage of this is that you can batch up very large jobs and then leave it running for long periods of time un-attended.

As a BMD user I really like the synergy between the two applications as I already know where most things are. For example, “preferences” where you set up your proxies, captcha solving services, threads etc is pretty much the same as in BMD, and is located in the same part of the navigational structure.

As with BMD you can use both byPass Captcha and De-Captcher, and can set which one takes priority. EdwinSoft are the only company I have seen implement this feature to account for down time of a captcha solving service. In short, if one service goes down, BMD / Article Demon will fail over onto the other service, so you effectively have a backup. Again, a great feature for un-attended operation.

The email account set up and confirmation process is also identical to BMD, and is a little convuluted compared to some other apps, but, it works well.

The synergy between Article Demon and BookMarking Demon will also be a benefit should I outsource some of these tasks, as outsourcers I use are already familliar with BMD.

Of course, if you do not have BMD then it may take a while to get your head around the way the queuing works, and take a while longer to understand why its done that way, and why it gives such an advantage (unattended operation).

Account Registration Results

I just ran Article Marketing Robots registration routine and got a little over 1000 successful registrations from the 1600 in the database.

I then ran Article Demon on the 1800 directories I have in its database. I actually batched up two jobs and ran registrationon 2 x 1900 = 3600 accounts.

From those I got close to 3200 accounts registered, so, nearly 1600 per account of the 1800 per account I started out with.

Another nice feature of Article Robot is the “Retry All Failed” button on the account registration page, so, you can retry the directories that failed to register. I did this but only got another 11 registrations, but its still a great little feature to have.

I registered my accounts on the maximum 40 threads.

So, in terms of registration of accounts we have:

• 1000+ from Article Marketing Robot
• 1580+ from Article Demon

But Article Marketing Robot did that out of the box, whereas I spent a considerable amount of time amassing the target list for Article Demon. Remember, out of the box, Article Demon only does 100 sites + 200 bonus sites which can be added on, so just 300 sites.

If you are going to use Article Demon, then you really need ScrapeBox to help you find the targets.

Article Posting Results

Ok so I finally got to the point where I was ready to submit my sites and started the job off. Article Demon uses the same “human emulation” that BMD does, which slows down the process somewhat, though, you can change these settings.

Whilst running the submission on Article Demon, I ran the same article trough Article Marketing Robot.

The results for reported successful submissions were as follows:

• Article Demon 694
• Article Marketing Robot 666
• Magic Article Submitter 200 ish (from an old run on the same article… for comparison, not to be confused with Magic Submitter which is a different tool)

Again, bear in mind that I spent a LOT of time building my own target list for Article Demon, whereas I have used Article Marketing Robot out of the box.

I am sure over time that Article Demon will get better and allow more and more targets to be added, pulling it ahead of AMR, but for now, the results are pretty much the same, and that is after investing  a lot of time getting targets for Article Demon.

In terms of the submission process, the category selection in Article Demon is a stand out feature. Its extremely fast. All you do is enter your keywords separated by a comma and it applies the best fit categories from each directory. You can preview the categories before you start the actual submissions. This is a brilliant feature as it allows you to edit your category keywords and target them for better results.

At the end of the process Article Demon again shows the “retry all failed” button so you can resubmit to failed directories, however, this did not yield particularly good results.

Reporting Features

As you would expect, Article Demon generates reports based on submission rates and verifies the presence of the links. This is a bit of an awkward process as you have to first run the “published?” check, and then set up your report. I was a bit thrown at first as no articles were showing in the report, then I noticed that you have to select the date ranges for your reports. I am never one to read instructions preferring to find out the hard way

The reporting is very comprehensive allowing you to sort on different parameters and export to a csv file.

In Built Spin Tool

I did not really use the spin tool in Article Demon as I own both “The Best Spinner” and “Magic Article Rewriter”. I use both of these programs regularly for different things. The Best Spinner is good for high quality spinners as it has a good list of user suggested synonyms, wheras Magic Article Rewriter has a better “once click mangle” process using the “Magic Tokens Database” which is an extra $20 or so.

However, I took a quick look at the in built tool in Article Demon and its pretty good, for an “in app” rewriter. It is certainly a lot better than the one in Article Marketing Robot, an has a decent amount of synonyms in it, and a synonym harvester, though, I did not figure out how to use that properly, I guess I will have to refer to the training material.

To be honest though, I would not entertain using anything other than a bespoke rewriter like TBR or MAR. Most of the time involved in article submission is in the rewriting, and I really would not want to do all that work with Article Demons in built tool. But, it is a good feature, and means anyone starting out can do what they need to without purchasing yet more software.

Creating and Using Accounts and Pen Names

Article Demon has a couple of nice features to assist in the creation of account and pen names, namely an “auto populate” feature, just click a button and it will add a name for you.

You can keep adding pen names onto the same account on services that support multiple pen names, a nice feature if you like to mix things up a bit.

Another great feature is that once you create multiple accounts and go to submit your articles, it will use a random account for the submission. I really like this, as again, it mixes things up for you. Of course that could be a double edged sword as you end up mixing different sites on the same account name, which may lead competitors to other sites you have submitted. However, you can also create multiple usernames per account creation run, which are used on many sites, so you can just enter user1, user2, user2 when creating accounts, which again, mixes things up a bit.

The fact that you can queue account creation, pen name creation as well as article submission means there is scope for creating lots and lots of different accounts with this software, far more than Article Marketng Robot.

The Scheuler

Scheduling in Article Demon is very slick, lifted pretty much as is from BookMarking Demon. You get pretty graphics of the calendar for three months down the sidebar, and can add jobs from any of the three queues:

• Account Creation
• Pen Name Creation
• Article Submission

I am not really sure what value queueing account and pen name creation is vs just running it immediately, well not if you are using proxies that is. I guess if you are using one IP address then it could be useful.

You can set schedules to run for weeks and weeks at a time with this software.

Scheduling is top notch in this software.

Proxy Support and Preferences

Like BookMarkign Demon you have a lot of control over the settings in Article Demon. You can load and test proxies, set response times on proxies before they are declared “dead”, control the number of threads, timeout settings, pause time between submissions to balance speed vs “human emulation”. You can choose to submit a maximum number of articles per run (from the queue), you can enabe / disable the “anti bot” settings which slow submission down if it detects too many failures, i.e. your IP being locked out. You can change the user agent of the browser.

You can control failure rates on captcha services, i.e. “quit after 3 fails”, and control whether you want to reclaim funds for failed captchas.

You can also control whether the app minimises to the task bar.

I am not sure all these settings are necessary for article submission, things like the browser agent switching seem like over kill, but they have been ported from BMD, so are available, if unecessary.

Article Demon vs Article Marketing Robot

I started this review as soon as I bought Article Demon so I was one of the first people to publish a review, and it has dragged over a couple of days as I kept scraping, entering targets, re-scraping to build my list. Then the submission process proved a little time consuming.

During this time I was testing AMR in parrallel, and could not help comparing the two products. Both are good, either would make a good purchase.

Article Markeing Robot:

• Cheaper to buy
• Cheaper to run
• Easy to use
• Fast (threaded)
• Has a scheduler
• Has reports
• Is pre-loaded with a decent target list

In a nutshell, it has all the key features you need, but no bells and whistles. I picked this tool up, registered some accounts, confirmed the mails, loaded an article and got well over 600 successful submissions reported, right out of the box. The interface its not refined or polished, but it works well, having pretty much everything you need no more than two clicks away from the main screen. The training materials are nothing like the slick videos produced by EdwinSoft (which really help with outsourcing). Overall thought, AMR does the job, and does it well.

Article Demon

Does everything AMR can, but better, with more advanced features:

• A feature to load your own targets and have them auto detect
• A PR checker to lookup PR of targets you add
• Proxy support
• Two captcha services can be used in conjuntion
• The scheduler is more advanced
• The rewriter tool is better
• The job queueing process is good for unattended operation
• The interface is slick
• The training materials are great
• The suport from EdwinSoft is excellent
• I got more links using this tool

I think going forward, as EdwinSoft improve the different plugins they use for the number of targets that can be added will increase making this software more powerful. That is not to say AMR will not respond by improving their own list.

Should You Buy Article Demon?

That is actually a bit of a toughy. If you want links from article sites you definitely want either Article Demon or Article Marketing Robot, the question is which one.

I think for most people Article Marketing Robot would be the better option. If you have a few niche sites and you want quick and easy links then this is a great product. You can just pick it up and use it. Its fast, simple, no frills link building.

If you want to push your article marketing as hard as you can, and are prepared to invest more time and effort, then Article Demon really is the superior tool. As mentioned, you need something like scrapeBox to harvest your lists, though I am sure these will be available for sale pretty soon (as they are for BMD). My guess is you will be able to pick up a good list for $20 or so before too long.

Knowing what I do now about these tools, I think I may well have opted for Article Marketing Robot, but, having already invested the time in setting up Article Demon I am going to keep it. Now my “show is on the road” so to speak, I think it will be a better tool going forward.

Also, I run these tools on a dedicated server where they can be left running 24/7 for weeks at a time. I think Article Demon is more suited to that kind of work than AMR.

So, I am sticking with Article Demon, but I think I will probably be in a minority there, at least a minority amongst “those in the know”, as I will wager most people will save themselves some time and money and go for AMR.

Updated 04th November:

EdwinSoft have now included another bonus with another 400 odd directories (I think). I dont know for sure as when I imported the list I only got two additional directories.

My own list is up to 3000 sites, however, there is an issue with WordPress sites. Article Demon will find and add any wordpress site that allows registration, for example, sites that require registration to comment. Those sites are not postable, so now, having scraped up a list of WordPress sites running ArticleSS I find my target list polluted with non postable wordpress sites. I have a plan to cleanse these sites and refine my list.

EdwinSoft also made changes to Article Demon to allow more sites to be correctly detected, but there are still Article Dashboard sites that are not importable, which is pretty weak when you consider the cheaper Article Marketing Robot includes them.

The batching of jobs really is proving to be a good feature for me. I can load up huge amounts of work and just set it running. The really nice thing is that you can add multiple account creation, pen name creation and article submission to the queue, then “run all queues”, or add your queues to the scheduler.

Article Demon will then pootle off and create the accounts before submitting whilst you take a well earned rest. This is a brilliant feature as it really opens up volume submissions. To explain further, if you use AMR, you have to run the processes for account creation before you can submit, which takes a while as it goes off to register on sites etc. Article Demon does not do this, everything is queued, which takes less time. So, you can build a massive task list for it, like “create 100,000 accounts,  then submit 100 articles”. You add all this to the queue, and then either run the queue or shedule it over a period of days. Very very good, this is really what you are paying for with Article Demon over AMR.

The other nice feature is the “projects” list, which allows you to keep separate sets of accounts and articles. I never mix accounts between promotions as it can lead people to more of your sites. What I mean by that is I do not want people clicking the “author” link on a directory and finding links to 10 other sites I have promoted. This is easily managed in Article Marketing Robot as you control which account you want to use per submission, but Article Demon allows you to mash things up a bit more within projects.

I now feel a lot happier with my purchase than I did a few days ago. After investing a lot of time in building my list just to “break even” with AMR I was none too chuffed, but now that work is done and I am pushing past what can be done with AMR I am glad to have the superior product in my tool box.

Think Carefully If The Price Goes Up!!

One final point, I bought Article Demon for $127. Their sales page says the price is going up to $197, and probably will at some stage, at least the price of BMD has gone up over the years.

At time of writing AMR is available for $77, and I believe has been offered for less with discount codes before. If the price of Article Demon does indeed go up, then I would have a VERY hard time recommending Article Demon to anyone but a true “power user”.

If you found this review useful please consider using my affiliate link when ordering Article Demon, and Ill let you have my target list, thanks!