Following on from my earlier post, in response to a question from ddt “How do I get Started in Affiliate Marketing? – WITH NO MONEY” , I promised to explain a bit more about BUM Marketing and Article Writing.
You may have heard the term BUM Marketing and thought, what on earth does that stand for? In fact it is not an abbreviation it is a marketing style that was designed and popularized by a man named Travis Sago. The reason why it is called bum marketing is because it is meant to be so simple and straight forward that if a bum off the street was given a computer with internet access, he would be able to generate money with this form of marketing in no time at all. You should be able to do it without spending any money.
There is actually very little difference between normal Article Marketing and BUM Marketing, but BUM Marketing is done to specifically earn affiliate income and/or create a “list” of potential customers. Plain Article Marketing is done for several reasons including building good quality backlinks and generating targetted traffic to your website containing Adsense or similar EPC (earn per click) networks.
Basic Bum Marketing Steps:
1. Choose a Niche market (like Forex)
2. Choose Affiliate Products to promote (generally ones that pay good commission and have good “gravity”)
3. Find some good keywords and groups of keywords that are searched regularly (I use Google Adwords Tool for this) This will tell give you lists of keywords and how often they are searched for in any country.
4. Set up a Landing Page like the examples in Part 1, you can use a free provider such as squidoo, synthasite, blogger, wordpress. Make sure you have the keywords you are targetting as the title and url i.e. if you are targetting “dog training guide” then look for http://squidoo.com/dogtrainingguide or http://dogtrainingguide.wordpress.com or similar, some people have suggested that using a – between words on squidoo is better, i.e. http://squidoo.com/dog-training-guide for search engine results.
5. Write a review or details of the product(s) that you are promoting on these pages and include your hoplink. Do not have any distractions or easy ways out on this page like Adsense adverts or links that are not hoplinks, you want the visitor to leave this page by clicking on the hoplink.
6. Open accounts at ezinearticles.com, hubpages, knol, etc (there are loads of article directories, but only a few rank well in Google) Knol is fairly new, but as a Google product I suspect it will start to rank well!
7. Write unique articles relating to the niche or even the products that you are promoting, they need to focus on the same keywords you picked in 3 and 4 above, in particular the title. Each of the article directories have different rules about content, links etc but ezine seem to be the most difficult to please and most inconsistent. hubpages is very easy to use, you can use images and they don’t have such stringent rules. On the flip side, you will get less exposure on hubpages than you will from ezine. hubpages is added straight away and ezine can take up to a week for an editor to approve or reject.
8. Keep submitting good quality articles to ezine and if you submit 10 in a row that are approved without problem, you will have the opportunity to ask for an upgrade to platinum status, this will give you unlimited submissions and apparently quick approval. More than likely you will not get platinum after 10 articles, and will be awarded basic plus status where you can add another 25 articles before going for platinum again, do not worry about this, just keep submitting good, keyword focused articles with links to your landing pages in the “resource box” or throughout on the hubpages example. You will get some traffic from these eventually and also good quality backlinks which will help your landing page rank higher and get more organic (free) visitors.
9. Bookmark your articles and landing pages using digg.com, propeller.com, furl.com, stumbleupon, del.icio.us etc, this will create good network of links, again helping search engine ranking of both the articles and landing page.
10. Keep updating landing pages and improve their “lens rank” etc by adding more features.
11. Most important, BE PATIENT – this is not a way to make money overnight, it will take a lot of time and effort and will take anything from 2-4 weeks to get a decent level of traffic and your first affiliate sale. It will be worth it in the end as the sales will be 100% profit and that feels great!
Good Luck – Tell me how it works out.
JZ
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I am afraid to give my real email address anywhere like this because I’m scared my email address will be “farmed” and my in box will get filled with spam. My in box is the lifeline of my business so please don’t do that. And please make a simple, clear privacy policy clearly accessible to people to check first when you require them to enter their email address. To me this is just common “website courtesy”.
Now then: I am very interested in many of the things you are addressing in your blog /articles but I am clearly coming from a different place. I am a person with an established website that gets quite a bit of traffic, has excellent SEO, and has a devoted niche market customer base. I do business exclusively on the web and my product is tangible; my product is not my “readership”.
If you are targeting people with businesses like mine, it would be so great if you could have “for dummies” explanations of many of your terms. I got into my business because I am a clothing designer and manufacturer and have used the web to market my products. All my “tech” knowledge is strictly limited to what I have needed to learn in order to run my business. I did not start the business as a techie looking for a way to make money, which it seems is the angle of your articles. I’m not such a person, but I am here trying to learn and get information to help my business.
If I am not your target market, I think others in my position (tangible product websites) and/or with my background (limited technical) might also really like access to the type of information your information! In order not to bore the sophisticated reader of your articles, perhaps you could have links to “for dummies” explanations of the terms you use.
I notice that almost 100% new customer acquisition is coming from forums and blogs that mention my business, so this is an area I must learn more about.
Also, I am interested in affiliate sales. I already have a website to which I refer many customers who offers affiliate fees, but I don’t understand it well enough. I’m looking for more information about this!
Thanks!
Katherine
[...] repsonse to a rather lengthy comment from Katherine Robinson here I decided that it would be a good idea to start an “Affiliate Marketing for Dummies” [...]