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+63 (917) 503-4874On the first months of my internet venture, I’ve heard tons of ways to make money online. For a start, you have those “Get paid to” sites. Pretty tempting for a 13-year old back then, but I never tried one. You have eBay and a whole lotta other ways. But what have most intrigued me is this – bum marketing.
For the next months, I will be doing a live experiment, testing if bum marketing still works.
What is bum marketing?
Easy as pie. You write an article related to the product that you will be promoting as an affiliate then submit it to Ezinearticles.com. Do the process hundred times. Wait for the search engines to rank you article.
Higher rankings = more traffic to your article = more clicks to your affiliate link = more affiliate sales.
Listen. Here’s the secret to bum marketing success… domination. Dominate every search term for the product.
Let’ say you will be promoting a fishing tip product. To dominate the niche of your product, try hitting long tail keywords e.g. trout fishing, Alaska salmon fishing, Florida fishing, etc. and write one article for every keyphrase.
Why bum marketing?
I’ll skip the long paragraphs and bull point it out ;-)
- No computer skills required
- You can start with a low budget
- You can start right now
- Money on snowball effect
Why not bum marketing?
- Too many articles to write
- You depend too much for search engine traffic
The solution
- Too many articles to write – If you don’t have the money, you’ll have to pay time to get money. If you don’t have the time, you’ll have to pay money to get time. Now I have the money, I don’t have to write the articles – I ordered my first batch of 15 articles from one of my writers.
- You depend too much for search engine traffic – Then why not add a dash of web 2.0? For this case study, I will be using Social Poster to bookmark the articles I’ve submitted to Ezinearticles.com. I will also make a couple of Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com pages.
What I’ve done as of now
If you want to do the same and test it for yourself – or do it for the profits, here are the things that I have done at the moment.
- Looked for a product to promote over at PayDotCom (Clickbank alternative) with a good conversion rate and a reasonable price
- Bought a domain name because Ezinearticles.com don’t allow direct affiliate links – $7.15 (with coupon price from godaddy)
- Bought 15 articles related to the product I will be promoting – $45
- Set upped a campaign on my autoresponder (I am currently with GetResponse) to capture leads for long term traffic – $17.95
- Bought a private label product to give people an initiative to sign up to my list – $3
- Hosted (I recommend Media Temple) my squeeze page where I will drive my traffic to – $20
- Did a keyword research via Aaron Wall’s keyword suggestion tool and targeted the keyphrases with around 100-300 overall daily search to compete with less competition
- Submitted an article to Ezinearticles.com
- Bookmarked my article using Social Poster
- Made a Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com page for my article
With that kind of set up, it would cost you less than a hundred dollars to start.
I did my best to cut the cost here for everyone to take play. You can eliminate some expenses like the buying of articles by writing ones on your own and probably the hosting if you’ve got your own host.
By the way, if you’re wondering what my squeeze page looks like, you can download a copy of it via this link.
What do YOU think?
Now, now, I’m not a bum marketer on any perspective. I just read a couple of guides here and there for this case study, added some of my ideas and a dash of today’s new traffic tactics.
I’m expecting a positive result from this experiment as the principles are quite promising.
How about you? What do you think of the experiment? Will I earn my money back? Is there anything you would like to add?
Nice post Carl, thanks for sharing your secrets. I’m checking them one by one now. :)
I agree with ya!
Bum Marketing used to work in the mid 2000 very well. I would be curious to see if it still works. For your keywords, only use keyword phrases with low competition and i would do under 900 monthly searches. You will certainly get ranked in Google’s first page. I will test this also!
great post Carl
At $45 for 15 articles, that makes $3 per article by my reckoning. Out of curiosity, what kind of quality of article do you expect to get for that sort of sum, or is that irrelevant to the overall aim?
The company I got for my content generation is still pretty new – but hey, they’ve been doin a great job for me for months and so far, I’m satisfied bout the quality of the articles.
Please can you tell me the name of the company/individual as i would like to try your experiment and do not know where to get reasonable articles written.
Thanks.
Bum marketing certainly still works. In fact, I currently live off the daily revenue articles I wrote 9 months ago are bringing in :-)
The downside to bum marketing is it can take up to 4 months before you start seeing a noticeable amount of revenue coming in. It is certainly more long term.
If you want to see some immediate conversions, setup a PPC campaign with Adwords, MSN, or Yahoo and drive paid traffic to your EzineArticles page. Run that for a while, then once you start getting high rankings shut off your PPC campaign and get rich off of organic traffic.
Just my 2 cents.
P.S. – Long tail keywords are king
Live off? Man that’s awesome! Would you like to share how many articles did it take you to reach that level?
I guess some can wait for four months for the organic results? ;-)
By the way, the web 2.0 bookmarking will give it an instant exposure and some backlinks for start.
Yes, I would use social bookmarking of course. I also use Pingoat.com and BlueHatSEO.com’s QUIT tool (both highly recommended). My articles usually got indexed within 48 hours. However, it took time before they had a steady place on the first and second pages of google for my keywords.
I currently have about 17 different products I promote and about 4 articles for each product. Around 65-70 total.
It’s a small living, but I am planning on expanding it. It was enough for me to quit my 9-5 which is good enough for me.
Hey, Sounds great I have been doing bum marketing for about three weeks very intensely. I have two articles from ezine on first page of google and 5 US Free ads on first page. I have not made a sell yet. Can you help me? I feel like I do very good article writing and SEO, however don’t understand why I haven’t made a sell yet. Thanks for any input.
I definitely think you will make some money. It will take a long time but sure as heck you’ll make money. I’m actually trying that out, with other things though.
I like the bum marketing title lol.
Sounded like a song to me… bum, bum, bum…
Interesting guide. Hope to see your analysis after sometime.
Bum marketing always sounds great. However, any time you make money its work…..Peroid.
If you would, when posting results take out the traffic driven to the squeeze page from this site to give us an idea of the “organic” traffic generated. No doubt this site will drive traffic, but how will this work for a true “bum marketer” without the number one ranking for make money online.
Anyway, best of luck and I hope you succeed and help others do the same.
By the way I’m going to stumble everyone who has commented, any and all love back will be appreciated.
Actually, I was thinking of not publishing the link here to get a more natural result.
I’m going to use the Social Poster, thanks! :]
Hi Carl,
Just a quick question from a newbie here. When you use Social Poster, isn’t your article submitted to ALL those social networking sites? Does it matter what topic my article is about?
Thanks,
Rhea
It’s your choice whether to submit it to all sites. The submission by the way is semi automatic. You will have to point and click, all it does is give you the submit link and copy pastes the description of your article.
Most social bookmarking sites provide a nice set of category you can choose from that is relevant to your article.
Thanks for sharing. Could you a case study when you’re done with your experiment?
These are new times, and this method sounds really interesting.
Peace.
Yes of course, I’ll post the results afterwards.
I tried BUM marketing a long time ago and I was not very successful, it takes a long time, you are giving your content away and the traffic is not always the best, also the people using my articles sometimes would not leave a backlink to my site.
Bum marketing is probably my favorite way of getting money on the fly… Though, should be patient with it… I have 6 months doing it w/o pay and now its giving me a consistent money…
The article reviews for affiliate products is a good way to make some good commission but I don’t know if its necessarily for bums… I doubt any old bum could reach high ranking in search engines….but who knows.
Hi Carl,
I look forward for the results of your experiment. Hopefully, it turns out great.
I also want to get into affiliate marketing in the future and I need some blueprint
to follow. Hopefully, this bum marketing still works.
Regards,
Richard
hey carl, why do you use getresponse? i mean every marketer uses aweber, proabably 99.6%
And where did you get that statistics? ;-)
I think that its still works but u have to put much efforrtt in it, write tons of articles daily so its not for everyone.
Well thats all great Carl,
but isn’t this so mainstream that it doesn’t work anymore? like, bum marketing must be more complicated than this!
are you giving it enough credit if you can just summarize it in 7 or so steps?
how do i find out more?
Kunal
Wow’ thats a great post you’ve made in a long time. How about some results in terms of money earned or hits? ^_^
Hey Carl,
I earn a lot of money with article marketing. Bum marketing is good for starters, but as you said, you’d better capturing email addresses.
By the way, I remember that the very first product (or second, don’t remember) I bought was the affiliate cash vault back in the days… I bought it from… Travis Sago!
I saw his ad on USfreeads and I got it. Disapointment though…
Anyway. Article marketing is a long term strategy.
But if you do it well, you can reap “quick profits”.
There is an art to this.
You are doing well till know.
Looking to see how your experiment is doing.
My TIP: article marketing is a number’s game… The more you write (or outsource) and submit, the more you will earn.
Franck the body guard.
It is a good idea but if everybody will start doing this I don’t think it will work.
Believe me, there are millions of opportunities in IM, so as in Bum Marketing.
This technique can be used for ANY topic you can think off. Think out of the box, this is NOT about products, it’s about people.
So the idea behind Bum Marketing is to provide valuable information for smaller groups of people, help them with a problem and offer a solution to the problem (shouldn’t that be always this way ?).
If people like what you write, and if this help them, they will most probably click at your recommendation.
Now you use this logic with Article Marketing and Long tail Keywords and you have it.
You can slice a market in thousand of niches and subniches, there are litteraly no limits. So even if all do Bum Marketing, there is still roon to play.
G.
I learned Bum Marketing From Travis Sago, the Master, here in Wealthy Affiliate.
Kudos to you Carl
When I was 13, I was shooting hoops and spending my lunch money on baseball cards.
Way to raise the bar ;) haha
scott
This is a very interesting experiment Carl, I am wondering if it would work well for me. I am not sure what products sell the best, any tips in that regard would be great. I thought something along the lines of Nascar products would do well but I am unsure.
Thanks and let me know!
Wow, $45 for 15 articles. I don’t know how much articles normally cost but this seems low to me.
I write articles for companies via PayPerPost for as low as $5 per article so $3 per article doesn’t seem to far out of the ordinary.
Most bloggers who start out with payperpost write articles for $5 to begin with.
This doesn’t seem like much, but I’ve earned nearly $300 in my first month with no PR and a high Alexa ranking.
Your not writing article dude, you’re getting paid for doing a review! get paid to blog is really the easiest for beginners but then I dont really feel its a good choice and it doesnt really have a great long term effect
Yes, it does work I have done it to promote a few of my blogs.
Most of the traffic came from ezine articles I submitted 10 articles.
You need to submit on seperate days so that they all dont show up
at the same for the serps.
But it is alot of work. you have to keeep adding articles or
it just drops.
What website are you using to buy Articles from. I Would be interested in using them if they are of a nice quality.
Thanks Carl
Great stuff I have been bum marketing a few months and just jumped on the Youtube train.
Thats for all the great advice, “Never Stop Learning”
Forgive me if I’m a little bit slow on the uptake here ;) But the domain you registered – do you have a link to it in your articles and do you have information on this domain about the product etc. or is it used as a redirection to the product you’re trying to sell?
Thanks. I look forward to seeing your results :)
There are many types of money making sites. Amongst of all of them, I consider one of them for its best quality. Such a sites are those, where its owner pays upfront some constant amount of real money as so called entrance fee for his future customer. He is doing this for the sole purpose of acquiring next client. And the real money is really paid on entry and this is absolute different approach to the common one, where the customer must pay his fee for presented, almost endless possibilities which entrant will receive – but after doing his upfront payment. You could experience this special treatment here.
i love to write articles on any subject but especially on business generation. I can say i learned a lot from you people here. Well done, Carl:-)
While I agree that article writing is a great tool for promoting products online, the best SEO tools are in blogging for the fast response time to the search engines.
Hello
At the moment i still learning how to make good income from internet, searching for great tips and advice to help me successful.
I found your articles very help me to get an idea about how to make money online.
Thanks once again.
JBiggs :)
“To dominate the niche of your product, try hitting long tail keywords e.g. trout fishing, Alaska salmon fishing, Florida fishing, etc. and write one article for every keyphrase.”
This is a good tip. :)
Buddy, you are not #1 for make money online anymore. Sorry…
Good luck CArl, and good luck getting the number one spot on google again.
I started with bum marketing but did not continue to pursue it – for me the results were next to none. I wrote 50 articles for a popular bestselling clickbank product (watch satellite tv on pc).
I guess since this is highly competitive it was not the right choice, or I did not use enough web 2.0 tactics – but I found other methods that give me a better return on time (believe it or not: AdSense!)
Anyway, look forward to your upcoming posts!
Wow carl no more numero uno.
This is a great post :)
I should really try that. I’m way older than you but I think age matters, right?
I’m going to use bum marketing for a product that I absolutely love and have been recommending to people both offline and online for years. It’s damn good, everyone loves it, and I’d be a fool not to sign up as an affiliate, so that’s what I just did. Good thing about it: There seems to be about two other people doing bum marketing for this product, and they aren’t doing a very good job at all. I think that’s the biggest problem people have with this: They suck at it. They’re just not doing it well enough. They’re not taking the time to learn about it and they’re not being dedicated enough to do an outstanding job. Their standars for their work is just too low. Also, people quit to soon. You don’t TRY to do this stuff and see if it works or not. You just DO. And then you keep at it until you succeed. (I know that sounds like Yoda, but it’s true. There is no ‘try.’) I think Bum Marketing will work well for a long time, but only for those who make a REAL effort at it. If you’re just going to ‘try it’ then it’d be better to just get a job flipping burgers somewhere instead. Anyway, good post.
Awesome post. Bum marketing will always work…forever. Trust me, it is a VERY VERY VERY longterm approach, you will not get rich fast. BUT, once the snowball effect kicks in, you will have recurring passive income possible forever. The hard you work, the more money you will make. Its all a numbers game…submit like crazy!
That would be me! I do these jobs all the time, it’s so much fun by the way!
I’m really going to give it a try. It sounds interesting.
Hey great post buddy, but i think when going into bum marketing you need to have very good idea about what you are promoting and studying it before writing about it. Its a tough work of patience :P
Hm…my only problem is getting a domain name. How can you get a domain name at such a young age without asking your parents? I like post4domains but not complete-offers for domains. That’s my real problem here. Also as I just started out with ezinearticles my articles are taking much too long to be accepted and I only have one.
Any tips are welcome, post here or send to email, thanks.
Keep it up!
You can start with a free blog at blogger.com. Later on, you will be able to transfer it on your own domain.
Great post, Carl. :)
Ok here is my question. You say that you send the visitors to affiliate offers. But you also say that you use squeeze pages and autoresponders. So how do you do it? I mean how do you send the visitors to the affiliate site AFTER they entered their email at your squezze page?
knowledge indeed is power. I sure have a lot to learn from you. Thanks for sharing anyway. I’ve never really taking time to learn about squezze pages, I guess I have to read up on them. Cheers.
Great Post Carl!
Wow, cool one! Don’t forget to let us know about the results :)
Hi Carl,
I chanced upon your website and am amazed by your achievements at such a young age!
I just started my BUM marketing efforts recently too. Do update us on the results of your experiment here soon!
:)
I have used the info gathered here to start a bum marketing empire of my own… So far the results are nonexistent due to traffic not yet trickling in… but once it starts, I am optimistic that this experiment will do well!
Hmm nice read…I’ll be referring to this again real soon
write your own ebooks, we will show you how to get started and how to market them so you can get the best return on your investment (ROI) possible. If you don’t have the author bug, you can still make a healthy living selling other people’s ebooks.
I enjoyed reading this article and have taken some fine points out of it. Bum marketing can work if done correctly, its just a matter of punching out those articles.
Jason
I have a question about article/bum marketing. Ive read that its wise to write atleast 1 article/day. I know that alot of people use Clickbank to find the products they wish to promote. Once you find your niche, are they daily articles youre writing all about this same product or do you pick a new niche to write about daily?
Also, people talk about using blogging and linking to their articles. What is an example of a good blog linking to an article?
Last question. Clickbank mainly consists of e-books. How can one find tangible items like purses, shoes, perfumes, phones, etc… to promote and how do you get an affiliate link to sale something like this in your articles?
Yes, the bum marketing market still works…i know because i was also using this method when i chanced upon carl’s web site just today!
Just to keep it short, most of the articles that i have written for my niche are at the top of google, page 1 for many of them, while a handful spilled over to page 2 of google.
For some of the articles, I dominated 2-3 results on google page 1 out of 10.
All these are bringing me few hundreds opt-in and sales for my promoting products every single month since I started doing this.
For those who have no extra $ to spend, or have not made any money online yet, this is a great and effective strategy to adopt!
Best wishes to all!
Donald
The SMART Infopreneur
OK Carl,
Where are your results?
How did you do?
This was a really interesting post but there really isn’t much of a conclusion without hearing what happened.
Thanks!
Hello Carl,
a great posting about bum marketing. Everyone who wants to be successful on the Internet has to think about bum marketing.
I will follow your blog!
To your success
Maik Jaeckle
Hi Carl, just ‘bum’ped into this post. Really interesting.
I was going to try bum marketing before some gurus say it’s not worth it anymore.
However this post made me think twice about bump marketing.
So how is the result Carl?
hi Carl,
thanks for great informative articles.may i know your ghost writer’s email, so i could ask him/her to write for me. thanks again
Hi Carl, I just read this great post. I came across Bum marketing method just one week ago and that is how I stumbled upon this website. When I thought of asking question I realized that this post is almost an year old. Anyway, let me ask this question anyway.
1) This bum marketing method revolves around posting articles to article directories. Out of this we are targeting basically the Article Views and the URL clicks which brings the visitor to our landing pages. In this scenario, what is one of the best click thru ratio (CTR) for an ezinearticle?
I have posted three articles in the last few days. All the articles were approved and published and it has the below statistics.
1) Article 1 – Views – 33 Clicks – 8 CTR (24%)
2) Article 2 – Views – 360 Clicks – 75 CTR (21%)
3) Article 3 – Views – 358 Clicks – 141 CTR (39%)
Overall Views – 751 Overall Clicks – 224 Overall CTR (30%)
I know it is a very less number of views for an analysis but it would be really great if the BUM Marketing veterans can tell me if this is below average, average, ok, great, or very good categories.
2) If any one of the BUM Marketing veterans can share their experience over the past one year (since this post is about an year ago) it will be really great for newbies like me.
Thanks in advance,
Ramesh.
No related topics? No follow articles with conclusions?
I’d LOVE to hear how the experiment went.
C’mon, give us SOMETHING ;)
Alex has a good question imho – what CTR can we expect on our articles?
And what hit/read numbers can be considered OKish to persue?
From my point of view though, Alex’ 30% CTR seems pretty darn great.
My own articles (8 so far on EZA, not uber quality but not bad either) have had a CTR of about 12% and 1500 reads in one week’s time (~200-250 each).
‘d love to hear some testimonials from people who actually put some work into article/bum marketing and had at least some amount of success (or none)!
Hi,
I’m trying to post to SocialPoster however after submitting it just returns tot he same page again without any indication that it has submitted. Can anyone shed any light on this. Thanks.
Thanks for the insights Carl. What about safe mail list marketing? Is this a good alternative to the Bum Marketing? I have tried with one safe list provider and get a very low response. From 2 million mails i get 12 clicks. From what i´ve seen in other comments some people are getting high CTR´s from article posting; i will give it a try…
Tried BUM before but I don’t really sure about how it meant to contribute in terms of SEO, because many of the article directories’ link juice were not as good as we imagined.
Thanks so much for this. I learned a lot from this blog post and it was really nice that you broke down the process for those who are new to marketing. Good post mate.
You used very strong words which I admire, Carl..
I agree with your domination point..
Need articles written? Articles with keyword stuffing or just repetition twice or thrice on a number of general topics, products and reviews. Focus on bum marketing and leave article writing to me.
I didn’t know this was called bum marketing. True that after the recent Google updates, it is harder than ever to rank for decent keywords. But still it ain’t impossible. Just we have to keep trying. Also, I don’t totally rely on search engines for traffic, neither should any internet marketer.
Nice post.Carl.
This is some good advice but I received better advice, looking uo how to make money with affiliate marketing.