Article Marketing - One More Try

A few months back, I gave Bum Marketing a try. I had a hard time getting into it, but it did bring in a little bit of money. So I’m giving it another go, and attempting to do a much better job this time.

What is Bum Marketing?

Here’s the gist: the marketing angle is that any bum off the street can make money without spending any through article marketing and affiliate programs.

You choose affiliate programs to promote (how you get paid). You write articles on topics related to the affiliate products. You make sure  you’re targeting keyword phrases that would bring in search traffic and that don’t have much competition. You publish the articles on article directories with a link to the affiliate page in your resource box.

People read the article, (hopefully) like what you have to say, and click on your affiliate link (again hopefully) buying the product based on your recommendation.

What I’ve Done:

I’m not an article directory fan, so I’ve avoided them in the past. Instead, I chose one product (The Six Figure Freelancer e-book by David Drake), which I could promote with a clear conscience. I did my bum marketing through Squidoo (multiple income streams, so I also tried to use keyword phrases that would attract decent ad clicks and such) instead of traditional article directories.

I also opted to do the promoting on my own blog (this one mostly), because I’d get any related advertising income directly (although this method obviously has much less traffic than a huge article directory).

In its limited scope, it’s worked. I added a few links to other affiliate products, and earned a little bit (for very little effort, which is why it was worth it).

What I’m Doing Now:

I’ve decided that a very simple plan worked well enough to justify giving it a more serious (and traditional) go. I’m still starting off with The Six Figure Freelancer as the main product to promote, but there are a few others that past clients have written that I could stand behind without question, so I’ll be expanding on that soon.

I set up my account with Ezine Articles yesterday for this, and published my first article. I’m essentially rehashing posts from this blog that have done well for me, and trying to target them to more narrow keyword phrases.

Ezine Articles is the biggest, and most well-known, article directory which is why I’ll be using them (I don’t have plans right now to publish to multiple directories until I see if this is worthwhile).

One issue with using Ezine Articles for Bum Marketing is that they don’t allow you to place the affiliate links directly in your resource box / paragraph. They do, however, allow you to add domain (top level only - not an interior page) to the resource box, which is redirected to an affiliate page.

If you don’t already have an extra relevant domain sitting around, you would have to get one to use this site for Bum Marketing (although you can use other article directories with a direct affiliate link, or things like Squidoo, so you don’t have to spend any money). I already have several domains sitting around. For this particular product I’m promoting, I’m recycling the old SixFigureWriters.com domain for the redirection (having it redirected here to the new site obviously wasn’t helping with my rankings and such anyway).  I have a few other domains I can use in the same way if I want to promote other products on Ezine Articles.

Right now I’m still waiting for that first article to be approved before I decide whether or not to keep pushing (they allow new account holders to publish 10 articles at first). So we’ll see how it goes with Bum Marketing on a larger scale. overall, I’m pretty happy with affiliate sales income-wise (better than Adsense for me), so I think this is a pretty natural addition to my mix with my focus this year being on writing “for myself” instead of mostly for clients.

Anyone else involved in Bum Marketing or other types of article marketing? How’s it working for you?