Article Miner Review
Update: Article Miner is no longer available for sale.
Update: I received an email from the creators of Article Miner telling me that they will be stopping sales of Article Miner effective May 1, 2006. They will continue to provide support and regular database updates, as well as keeping the forum open, but the program has been such a success and they have decided to cap sales: "we won't forego the quality support users have been accustomed to in order to squeeze out some more sales."
So if you've been sitting on the fence on this one, Article Miner will only be available for purchase until the end of April, 2006.
Update: Someone has just kindly emailed me to let me know that the price of Article Miner is now $147, not $97 as stated in my review. It was $97 when I bought my copy of Article Miner, and I'm not sure when they raised the price, but anyway, I just checked, and the price on the sales page IS $147.
Now, on with my review!
I picked up a copy of Article Miner last week. When I first came across it, my first thought was, "I could really use this!" But I did think about it for a while, because $97 isn't exactly small change, and the thing is, it basically automates something which I have been doing manually for the most part.
It's turned out to be a good purchase. If you've never come across it before, Article Miner is software that includes a database of over 100,000 reprint articles downloaded from about ten article reprint directories. There's a regular update (monthly, I think), which updates your database to include the most recent batch of articles added to these directories.
Unlike other article fetching software, with Article Miner the database of articles actually sits on your computer, so you're not using up the article directories' bandwidth doing automated searches for articles, which is a plus. However, be aware that it's quite a large download, and it's recommended that you download via a high speed connection rather than dial up. I'm not sure how long it took me to download the program - I'm on cable, and I basically started the download and then went and had dinner. When I got back, the download was complete.
In addition to the huge articles database, the software automatically formats all the links in the authors' resource boxes, which is quite a timesaver in itself. You can run keyword searches based on article titles, or the body of the article, or you can require that a keyword be found in both the title and the body, which gives you more relevant results. It's easy to quickly skim through each of the articles found in your search and delete any from your search results that you don't want to use.
Article Miner can be used to build your sites, too. It runs on a template system, and you can input any template you want, using tags to add the articles to the template. Adding the tags to a template is easy as long as you know a little bit of html. While there are a set of templates included, they are very basic, and I'd definitely recommend adding your own templates to the list.
Once you have your articles, you can convert the articles into web pages, with your choice of extensions. There's also a snippet creator, a sitemap creator, a Google XML sitemap creator, an RSS feed creator and a conversion to a format that can be used with RSS2Blog.
Article Miner also lets you import your own articles into the database. This is a great feature if you're like me and write a lot of your own content.
There's also a feature that lets you grow your site slowly by uploading new pages of your site gradually. I haven't tried this out yet, but the software lets you set up the time for it to ftp new pages up to your site, directly from your desktop.
I've also looked through the support forum, and the developers are very active and very responsive. They also ask for new feature ideas, and while the software has only been around for a few months, they've already upgraded it with new features. In my books, that's always a good sign.
But really, what I like best about this software is the fact that the database now sits on my hard drive. Strange, but true. It's been fun playing around with keywords and searching to see how many articles certain keywords pull up. Another nice feature is that the program gives you a keyword density analysis for each article - including the ones you import.
So if you publish a lot of reprint articles, I would definitely recommend this program. Article Miner will save you a lot of time. However, it is on the pricey side, and the bottom line is that if you can't or don't want to spend the money, you can still do the job of finding articles in article directories manually, or with a program like AC Fetcher, which searches a database of articles from GoArticles. But when you consider all the other features, including the site building and the dynamic growth capabilities, it's well worth the cost.
Click here for more information about Article Miner.
