The Bum Marketing Method is DEAD?
The Bum marketing Method – has it died? For all those who have been marketing for at least a few months should be quite familiar with the bum marketing method or what is commonly called bum marketing. For the entire 2007, it was a hot topic.
Today, while everyone is talking about Web 2.0, I want to share a little bit about what bum marketing really is and whether you still can make any money with it.
Just What Is Bum Marketing?
In one sentence, this form of marketing makes use of high traffic, search engine favored sites like EzineArticles, Squidoo, HubPages etc to channel traffic to the affiliate sales page and make sales.
Traditional SEO is challenging and for newbies, it can be a daunting task. To rank a web page in the search engine can take months and there is no guarantee at all.
With the bum marketing method, even newbies can take an article from nothing to Top 10 in Google. So, do you want to be a bum marketer?
Bum Marketing Explained
There are a few key elements to make this whole bum marketing method profitable for you.
1. A Profitable Niche
2. Long Tail Keywords
3. Website that Gets Google Love
4. Target Website (Optional)
Finding a Profitable Niche
Not all niches are profitable. Forget what some “gurus” say about using your favorite hobbies or interests as your target niche. While you may be a “professor” in your favorite subject, it can prove to be ultra unprofitable when it is not something sellable!
Popular niches like weight loss and dog training may be competitive, but these are also topics with a hot and huge market ready to buy. All you need to do is to narrow down your niches. This is the key to success with the bum marketing method.
Here’s a Quick 2 minute Litmus Test to find Profitable Niches for Bum Marketing:
1. Search ClickBank’s marketplace. Now, ClickBank has 10,000s of products and has a wide network of affiliates marketing the products. The reason why we want to look at this is simple. If the product is selling well and their affiliates are making money, then it is worthwhile for us to copy! It does not take you more than a few seconds to see what is hot!
In each category, find the top 10 most sellable products, these are broad niches you can dig deeper into. Pick one or two niches. For example, “weight loss”.
2. Hop over to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool and do a quick keyword search on the broad term “weight loss”. There you will find all the related keywords to weight loss. You probably will be able to see some trends here. For instance, many are searching for quick ways to lose weight, weight loss pills, and weight loss diets.
So, from the broad niche of “weight loss”, we have managed to find 3 narrower niches to target!
3. Finally, Google the 3 narrower niches “quick weight loss”, “weight loss pills” and “weight loss diets”. Take a look on the right and see how many Google ads are there.
Chances are the one with the most ads is the most profitable! Otherwise, they will not promote and pay so much for the ads right?
I did cover about Long Tail keywords or Long Tails in my earlier post. If you missed it, you can read it here.
“Using Long Tail Keywords for Article Writing”
Compile a list of 10 to 20 long tail keywords. These are what we will create unique content around.
If you are not great at writing, or find it daunting to write 10 to 20 articles based on the keywords, use Instant Article Wizard. You can easily write one unique article within 10 minutes!
Using EzineArticles and Squidoo for the Bum Marketing Method
Using the articles, go and post it to EzineArticles or Squidoo. EzineArticles does not allow you to link directly to an affiliate sales page but Squidoo does.
If you are using Squidoo, then feel free to slap your content with your affiliate links throughout your content. But for EzineArticles, it works best if you could simply create a 1-page website or a blog from Blogger.com and WordPress.com embedded with your affiliate links.
One trick here, is to link to the Squidoo lens from your EzineArticles article!
If you follow my instructions on how to select the right long tail keywords and article writing techniques, then it will not take long for you to start seeing traffic and sales coming in within 1 or 2 weeks if not days.
The magic is in the ranking of your EzineArticles article and Squidoo lens in the search engines for your target keywords. My friend teaches you the exact steps to writing an article that gets ranked Top 10 in Google! See how he does it.
In my next post, I shall reveal some powerful bum marketing secrets to help you supercharge your traffic and sales!
Tags: , affiliate, affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing guide, Article Marketing, article writing, bum marketing, bum marketing method, internet marketing, keywords, long tail keywords, make money online, online marketing guide, secret article profits, the bum marketing method, travis sago, unique content
5 Responses to “The Bum Marketing Method is DEAD?”
By Fendi Salim on Feb 28, 2008 | Reply
Hi Davion, great post. I recently blogged about the basics of Bum Marketing as well and while I prefer using squeeze pages as my landing pages, I think your method about using Hubpages and Squidoo rock as well.
So any thoughts about squeeze pages as your own landing pages?
Fendi Salim
By Davion on Feb 29, 2008 | Reply
Hi Fendi, I have used squeeze pages as well. Let me share what I discovered.
Squeeze Pages are great if you have a solid set of autoresponder messages to sell your product. It works even better if your audience or rather market has a wide mix of products. Example, in the beauty industry, you can offer a whole range of products from skin care to hair treatment and so on.
However, I realized that I get a lot more sales selling directly to my prospects, rather than via squeeze pages. So unless you have plans to build a long term relationship and do more backend and upsells, then squeeze pages may not work well for you.
There is yet another trick I employed that helped me to build my lists and sell to them at the same time.
In your autoresponder settings, when they register through your squeeze pages, lead them to your affiliate sales page directly after that instead of flashing your “Confirmation Required” page. In this way, you’ll kill 2 birds with 1 stone!
By Fendi Salim on Mar 1, 2008 | Reply
Hi Davon, great stuff.
I pride myself on writing great autoresponder messages prior to building squeeze pages LOL! I think it’s important as you mentioned and also about the niche potential.
Now that you said, you get more sales selling directly, I believed you as well. I have a site doing just that and believe me it works.
For the trick you mentioned, I do a variation. I lead to a “Confirmation Required” page and place a >>Click Here Next at the bottom to lead them to the sales page. I’ve seen pages doing a html redirect using a timer as well. I guess you’ll have to time that with how long you take to read the page. It’s cool.
Let’s keep bumming mate. The articles are that important to be out consistently.
By harryheys on Sep 7, 2008 | Reply
Re: the problem with Ezine not allowing direct links to merchants - is it OK to use redirects? I thought I had read somewhere that this is OK?
By Davion on Sep 7, 2008 | Reply
Hi Harry,
For affiliate links, use a top level domain ie http://www.thisismydomain.com to forward to the affiliate link. Use masking features within your domain management area and people will only see http://www.thisismydomain.com not knowing it is an affiliate site.
EzineArticles will allow top level domains that forward to affiliate ie merchant sites.