Make Affiliate Money

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

Popularity: 1% [?]

This is in response to a comment by ddt.

Part 1

The first thing I must tell you is that Affiliate marketing is not “easy” and you probably won’t make hundreds of thousands of pounds overnight.  I have been testing and trying different things for over a year now, just on Clickbank products.

This is going to sound like an advert, but until I found Nichechoppers I really was just playing around with it.  Norb provides amazing graphics and assistance with all of his products, just check out his everLoss product at the moment and show me another publisher who will give you a ready made minisite with such amazing graphics.  All you need is a domain, a web hosting account, a basic html editor (notepad works if you don’t have cash) and then ftp software to upload a ready-made site already SEO optimised.

If you literally have no money, try squidoo or synthasite.  Synthasite will literally allow you to have your own site with no adverts whereas Squidoo is covered in Adsense ads.  An example of one of my squidoo pages is http://www.squidoo.com/efficient-planet

I produced this very quickly using affiliate materials from several publisher sites.  It is simple and to the point with cloaked affiliate links to the publishers sites.

An example of one of my synthasite pages is http://10minuteforexreview.synthasite.com which I created as a landing page for PPC adverts.  The bonus with doing this with synthasite is that you will also rank well in search engine results if you have good website titles and good content.

In my opinion this landing page looks very professional but was made just from content provided by publishers.  You will note that the affiliate links I have used in this example have not been cloaked and include a “tid” that tells me that the hops came from adwords traffic.  This allows me to track conversion rates.

I hope this gives a few examples of how to start affiliate marketing for free, also known as BUM Marketing.

In Part 2 I will explain a bit about Article Writing.

Any more questions, please write a comment.

James

Popularity: 34% [?]