Bum Marketing

To say that Bum Marketing (so named becaus any bum could do it) was a fad that has had its day would be an overstatement...although there's no doubt that it's nowhere near as easy to be a successful bum marketer as it once was. Like with Adwords, you just have to be a bit smarter.  

Appearing around 2004, the basic concept was that you:

• find a product at Clickbank
• write an article about a problem and how the product was the answer (I've seen so-called articles that were just poorly disguised paraphrases of the product's sales page)
• post it at various article banks
• include your affiliate link in the bio box &
• pick up your commissions  

Well, that's how Bum Marketing was, but the poor, SPAM-like quality of so many articles quickly led to Article Banks banning affiliate links in both the text body and the bio-box, resulting in  many Bum Marketers giving up their task. Thank goodness!

That's not to say that Bum Marketing's disappeared altogether but you can find out how it's mutated towards what I refer to as Bum Marketing 2.0. The idea is to:

• use keyword research to find a lucrative market
• find a clickbank product to promote to that market
• write an article to promote the product
• point the bio box to a web-page (in the example below, a 1-page blog) &
• display the affiliate link on that page and make your commission  

Microniches & Promoting Clickbank Products Here James J. Jones, a little-known but always interesting marketer, goes through the process performing the all-important keyword research with his Microniche software, finding a market that has little competition. Then he applies Bum Marketing and voila... See video #1

I actually don't use this software as I can use Keyword Elite for the same function but Micro Niche Finder is considerably cheaper and performs this Bum Marketing task perfectly well.

The important thing, though, as with all writing, is to make the article interesting. Just writing it really isn't enough.