So Just What Is Bum Marketing?
So Just What Is Bum Marketing?
"Bum Marketing" or the “Bum Marketing Method" is a simple and almost dummy proof variation of article marketing. Bum Marketing is really for anyone who is selling their own product, an affiliate product or wants to get traffic to a website, whether it is an opt-in page, an AdSense site, or a site full of affiliate links. Here’s how it works: You write keyword optimized articles about under-exposed niches, submit them to popular article websites, let the search engines pick them up, earn affiliate commissions, get opt-in signups or make money from selling your own products.
Although article marketing has been around for years, the phrase “Bum Marketing" was invented and popularized by Travis Sago of www.bummarketingmethod.com.
Why is it called Bum Marketing? Well it's supposed to be so easy that even a 'bum' off the street can do it, and more importantly make money with it, starting from scratch with no money.
Bum Marketing can essentially be broken down into six components:
- Find a mostly untapped niche market
- Research a low competition keyword or keyword phrase to target for that marked.
- Find a product that is complementary to targeted the niche and keywords that you’ve decided to use.
- Submit Write an article or series of articles based on the low competition keyword or keyword phrase.
- your article to popular article websites and let it get picked up by the major search engines.
- Earn money!
If you are struggling to make money online… Bum Marketing may be your solution. It has been the contributing factor to helping thousands of people to make their first online sale. And the best part is it doesn’t cost much… in fact it doesn’t need to cost anything at all. That’s the whole point!
One of the main goals of Bum Marketing is to get your articles onto the first page of Google as well as Yahoo, MSN, AOL and others. The easiest way to accomplish this is by writing keyword rich articles for niches and keywords that aren’t overpopulated. A placement on Google’s first page will assure that your article will be one of the first seen whenever someone searches for the keyword or niche your article is targeting.
Some of the Main Benefits of Bum Marketing Include
- Easy to make affiliate sales
- You can use it to drive traffic to AdSense pages
- Ability to drive traffic to opt-in pages to build list
- Can drive traffic to product sales pages
- Allow you to make money online with no website
- Make money on short notice
- Costs little or no money
- Very low risk
You Don’t Need a Website
Another reason “Bum Marketing" is so aptly named “Bum Marketing" is that as an affiliate marketer, you don’t need a website to make it work. Since the premise behind it is that you write articles with affiliate links either embedded in the article, or in your signature, you’re sending them directly to the sales page for the product you’re promoting.
Without a website, you will significantly cut the cost of doing business because you won’t be paying for site maintenance. Other cost reductions such as, maintaining and providing product and by using effective, lower cost, advertising you will be keeping more profits from you efforts.
But, some articles sites like ezinearticles.com don’t allow you to use or promote affiliate links, so where do you send the visitors if you don’t have a website. That’s easy you send them to a blog. Why a blog? It’s easy to set up, there are no hosting fees when using a service like Wordpress or Blogger, there are no design costs and it takes less than 30 minutes. Plus, you can post all your articles using all the affiliate URL’s you want.
You can update your blog as often as you like with new posts, or even add static pages in a snap, and search engines’ spiders are attracted to the blogs because new bits of information are added to it every day or two. Since, search engines love blogs it’s a super simple and easy to get some extra traffic and earn extra commissions.
Some people opt to create a blog for each set of niche related articles and products that they promote, from which you can provide reviews and other information.
The only cost to you is the time spent adding your articles and affiliate links.
Locating Extremely Profitable Niche Markets
The first step in Bum Marketing is to locate niche markets that remain relatively untapped – preferably something that you know a little about. Also ensure that it is a niche that you can identify as one where people have a need or a problem.
1. Find a hungry niche.
2. Research what they’re hungry for – find out what makes them tick.
3. Find an affiliate product that is a perfect match (or you could create one yourself but it’s more work and therefore more risk)
Some places you can look at include places like eBay Pulse, Yahoo Answers, forums, chat rooms and by using some of the keyword tools listed below. You can even look in offline places including newspaper headlines, weekly gossip magazine headlines and so on. Don't simply assume that the only place you will find ideas is on the web – that’s where almost everyone else is looking. The offline world better reflects what people are really concerned, worried or interested about.
Once you think you may have found a niche market, see if there is a product you can find to solve that niche’s problem.
It could be a product of your own, one you create or a product belonging to someone else. Some good places to find products include Clickbank.com, Commission Junction at cj.com or Linkshare.com which are essentially massive affiliate product directories. Or you can simply perform a simple web search to see if you can find something good with an affiliate program.
There are literally hundreds of website owners willing to pay you a percentage of the sale price of the products and services you endorse. When you become anaffiliate with these sites, you are basically advertising for them and can make as much as 75% commission from each sale you are responsible for.
Once you find something good, check to see if the Internet has people who are already servicing this market and then research the product like crazy until you become an expert on it.
Simple & Easy Ways to Finding Low Competition Keywords
Keyword research is definitely the key to making Bum Marketing work and probably one of the hardest parts of it.
Bum Marketing really revolves around keywords that are not being targeted by any or many other sites, writing articles about them, then using the articles to drive traffic to your affiliate link for something you can make money with.
For example, let’s say that you’ve found a new fat burning doodad. Then you do some keyword research for the phrase “buy fat burning doodad" and find that the phrase is only listed a few hundred times in Google’s search results. Then you simply find someone who sells “fat burning doodads" and is willing to pay you anywhere from a 35% - 75% commission of the purchase price for any sales you make. So you write an article about buying fat burning doodads that is targeted to the phrase “buy fat burning doodad" and submit it to the article directories.
The primary idea here isn't that people will find you in the article database. A few people probably will, but that’s not the point. What you’re really hoping to do is use the high page rank of the articles directories to help your article achieve high search engine ranking results.
One of the easiest ways to do keyword competition research is to go to Google, and perform a keyword search for the keyword or phrase you are targeting. Ideally you want there to be no more than 1,000 – 5,000 competitors for the phrase you are targeting. If there’s any more than this, you may only be able to get a first page ranking when putting your keyword phrase in quotes (i.e. “search term").
If you use a keyword phrase like “marketing tips" there are thousands upon thousands of other sites that might have it embedded in their keyword phrases including “internet marketing tips" “email marketing tips" “small business online marketing tips" so getting top 10 results would be almost impossible. In all honesty, “marketing tips" in not a keyword phrase you would ever want to consider using as it is not at all targeted and is certainly not considered to be a nice.
Some of the Best Free Keyword Tools Include
- http://www.nichetaxi.com
- http://www.goodkeywords.com
- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- http://www.spyfu.com
- http://keyword.secretstohighprofit.com
Some of the Best Paid Keyword Tools Include
- http://www.keywordcountry.com – allows you to maximize AdSense earnings and search over 600,000 niche keywords
- http://www.adwordanalyzer.com – helps uncover targeted niche markets and maximize AdSense Campaigns
- http://www.keywordelite.com - helps to uncover niche keywords and analyzes PPC campaign competition
Sometimes Quantity is Better than Quality – Writing Articles
The Bum Marketing method is one of the only times I can thinks of where quantity is better than quality. It’s about writing lots of articles that are of decent quality rather than a few articles of a high quality. (note – I’m not saying that you should put out garbage articles, that would be just plain dumb. Although your articles need to be very informative, they do not have to be written from an English major’s perspective J)
It reasons that the more optimized articles you write, the more your chances increase of showing up in the first pages of Google’s results.
Only choose to promote products which are based around a subject that you are comfortable with. If you don’t know anything about Golf, how can you write an article about it without a lot of research and a lot of wasted time? This is one thing that so many people seem to be doing wrong and then they wonder why it takes them two or three hours to write a decent article. However, if you know your content, you can just sit down and start writing – no (or very little) research required.
Write shorter articles instead of longer ones. If more is better, then it makes much more sense to write two 300-400 word articles then one 600-800 word article. It virtually takes the same amount of time and pretty much doubles the income you can earn. It won’t help you rank better in Google to have a few hundred extra words
Write “how to" or “tip" related articles. If you’re writing an article about a red widget that saves time, then your article could be on “How to Save Time" or “5 Time Saving Tips" where you would provide the content and then introduce the red widget at the end as the solution either in the content of the article (if allowed by the article directory) or in your signature. Or you can simply write a review of the product or service that you have settled on promoting.
Hint – I find that articles that contain a number in the subject seem to get a lot more reads then others. For example “8 easy ways to increase your golf game".
It also helps not to edit for spelling, grammar and sentence structure while you type. It saves tons of time to do that at the end – only once you’re done writing. Add it to your blog and ping the directories (http://www.pingomatic.com) and submit it to the article directories.
Submitting Articles
eZineArticles is by far the biggest and best article directory on the net. Usually takes a few days to be accepted, but once it is it usually shows up in Google and ranks well within a couple of days. The big downside to eZineArticles is that they don’t allow you to use affiliate links and it needs to be reviewed by a real person before it is published.
GoArticles.com is another search engine directory for articles. Articles submitted to GoArticles usually achieve good placement with Google, and you are allowed affiliate which link directly to a merchant.
Like GoArticles, they also allow you to submit articles with embedded affiliate links and they are also liked by Google and good for first page rankings.
Good Article Submission Sites
- http://www.submityourarticle.com
- http://www.wesubmitarticles.com
- http://www.articlemarketer.com
- http://www.isnare.com/distribution.php
Other Promotion Methods:
After you have finished writing your articles, added them to your blog and submitted them to the directories, you might as well get maximum exposure from them - so here are a few other promo methods:
www.EBay.com – You can take a pack of 5, 10, 15 articles on a similar topic that you have written about and turn them into a PDF ebook with affiliate links embedded. Then list it on eBay and sell it. If you want to go a step further, you can sell it with either master resell rights or even private label rights.
www.USAFreeAds.com – This is a free classified ad site that a lot of people use to put ads on which can also help to get good Google rankings. You need to target keywords that have at least 500 searches and less than 1,000 results.
www.Squidoo.com – You can use Squidoo to create a lens for each product you promote and then send people directly to the affiliate sales page or even to your blog (see below) for reviews and additional info, just as you would with your blog
www.CraigsList.com – You can also post one (no more or it may be removed) ad to CraigsList to get additional traffic / sales.
Suggested Bum Marketing Layout Plan
Here is a suggested plan or outline to use for every product that you promote.
- Start a product blog and use articles / reviews as posts
- Start a Squidoo lens
- Package them into an ebook and list as an eBay auction
- Post 5 ads to USFreeAds
- Submit 1 post to CraigsList
- Create one MySpace Profile
If you can do this once or twice a week (the more often the better, within reason of ourse), then you’ll be well on your way to making Bum Marketing work for you.
So how many articles do you need to write to earn $2,500 monthly?
Below I have provide a simple chart that you can use to estimate how many articles you will need to write each month to reach your earnings goal.
Disclaimer: Keep I mind that the chart below is just for illustration purposes and the numbers used are simple numbers for the sake of easy math. Your results will vary depending on factors such as the amount of effort you put into this, the quality or your articles, market, product demand, website conversion rates and other factors.
The Bum Marketing Magic Manuscript - Monthly Earnings Chart | |
#1- Determine how much do you want to earn monthly? | $2,500.00 |
#2- Find a product (or products) that pay at least this much in commission? | $25 |
#3- Determine the number of sales you’ll need to reach your monthly goal: | 100 |
#4- Plug in the average sales page conversion rate: | 1% |
#5- Factor in the number of visitors needed at sales page to reach your monthly goal: | 25,000 |
#6- Figure the expected percent of visitors to click-through to sales page: | 10% |
#7- Figure of the total number of article views you will need to reach your monthly goal: | 250,000 |
#8- Add in your expected monthly views per article: | 2500 |
#9- Number of articles needed to reach your monthly goal: | 100 |
#10- You’ve reached your goal! J | $2,500.00 Monthly! |
Now as with any internet money making method, don’t expect things to happen overnight. Articles need to be picked up by Google for things to start working, which may take a few days. And the more articles you write, the greater your chances you have to make money. It isn’t uncommon for people to have their first sale in a week or two. As with anything, the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. And once you start to get things out of it, it will slowly start snowballing out of control. Think about it: If you write 25 articles a week for an entire year, you’ll have over 1300 optimized and targeted articles out there earning money for you. Use the tips and techniques throughout this report to help you leverage your time and maximize your effort.
Bum Marketing is definitely one of the easiest, most profitable marketing systems I have seen yet. If you really want to make a profit on the internet you must try this marketing plan.
