Bum Marketing or Article Marketing – What’s The Difference?

Bum marketing is a simple method of article marketing which focusses on earning commissions from promoting affiliate products, AdSense and so on. In much the same way as article marketing, with bum marketing you write keyword optimized articles for niches that are not too competitive and submit them to popular article directories. The idea being search engines will index the articles and give them good rankings because the article directories are viewed as authority sites.

The basic concept behind bum marketing is you don’t have to spend any money in order to generate an affiliate income. So instead of spending money on domains and webhosting you use freely available third party website such as Squidoo and Blogger to create landing pages. Each article will link to one of these free sites where readers can get more information on the product being promoted.

With article marketing you generally link to your own webpages which has three major advantages:

1. You can build an opt-in list which can dramatically increase your affiliate income.
2. You can redirect your article readers directly to the product being promoted.
3. You don’t have to worry about your pages being deleted as they can be on third party website.

In case you’re wondering, bum marketing is a marketing style that was the brainchild of Travis Sago. The reason why it is called bum marketing is because its simplicity means if a bum off the street with no money was given access to a computer with internet access, he would be able to generate money with this form of marketing.

This makes bum marketing somewhat unique; it’s one of very few occasions in internet marketing where making money is possible without spending any money.

However this ability to earn without having to spend any money does ultimately have a price. You do not have any long term control over the third party websites where you publish your landing pages. You could very well wake up one morning and find your income has dried up because your accounts on the third party websites have been cancelled.

This means bum marketing should be viewed as a great way to start affiliate marketing because there is no upfront cost other than your time, but once your bum marketing efforts are generating enough income you should consider changing over to the more traditional article marketing. Your long term income will be more secure because you send article readers to your own webpages (which you have complete control over) and can incorporate other income generating marketing methods such as list building.

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