Karlonia.com

Over the past two weeks, I have been reading some interesting emails and articles about a technique called “bum marketing”. Travis Sago has been building up his subscriber list by offering some good advice along with some mini e-courses in this particular genre, which is something that I am considering doing eventually as soon as I get some opt-in forms and autoresponders set up. For those of you who do not want to read through a long post, I will summarize the steps needed to get started and make money with this strategy below and then reprint some of Travis’s recent emails that will more throughly explain the details.

What Is Bum Marketing?

Bum marketing is a niche within the Internet marketing field that uses techniques designed to allow a novice who has no money to start (hence the word “bum”) achieve a modicum of success and eventually build up a significant stream of passive income. It is similar to article marketing, except instead of trying to sell the articles yourself, you can leverage the favorable SEO positioning of article directory sites to bring traffic to your links, and then make money through affiliate sales. Here are the basic steps involved in executing this type of plan:

1. Select a keyword phrase that does not have too much competition but still relates to a fairly popular product that can be sold through your affiliate link. Suitable keywords can be found by using Overture or Wordtracker and then doing an exact match search (that is, place quotation marks around the whole phrase) at Google while paying attention to the total number of results. If this number is below 5,000 or so, then you probably have a good keyword. As for the products themselves, the easiest place to start with is Clickbank, although you can also include products from other networks such as Commission Junction or PayDotCom.

2. After you have a keyword phrase and a product to link it with, write an article around the chosen keyword, making sure to include the phrase once in the title of the article and a few times throughout the text of the body.

3. When the article is finished, submit it to one of the main article directories such as GoArticles.com, USFreeAds, or Ezinearticles.com. When you get to the author’s resource box or “bio box” part of the submission, you can include your affiliate link here. Most sites will allow you to link directly to the merchant’s site, but a few of them such as Ezinearticles.com will require you to link to some type of landing page from which you can then redirect visitors to your affiliate link. If you have no money to start, you can set up a free Blogger or Wordpress site for this. Otherwise, if you have at least a small amount of money, you can set up your own domain name and hosting. Then you can just upload the landing pages to your server.

4. After a few days to two weeks, your article should appear in the search engine results, hopefully ranking somewhere in the top 10 for your chosen keyword phrase. If you manage to get a good ranking, some visitors will click through to your article and affiliate links at the bottom. Eventually, a few of these people will convert into sales, thus giving you a small amount of passive income.

5. In order to increase your income, simply repeat the process with other products and low competition keyword phrases. For the fastest results, many marketers recommend writing at least one article per day, but there is really no set rule for this. Like all types of Internet marketing, this technique allows you to work at your own pace without the stress of deadlines, bosses, or other annoyances that are commonly encountered in the traditional corporate world.

For some additional tips on how to succeed with bum marketing, here is some more information from one of Travis Sago’s recent emails:

Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Puddy posted an entry to his blog last week about the problems with Hotmail and many other free email providers. Apparently Hotmail is now disabling links in even plain text emails and is also automatically placing mail that comes from any new IP address into the spam folder. Puddy’s latest email to his subscribers in the UK resulted in a massive bounceback from every Hotmail and MSN email address on his list simply because it contained a single URL. Since these kinds of issues are obviously a problem for Internet marketers, Puddy is recommending Gmail for people who need a free and reliable email service.

I can certainly agree with his sentiment here. Although I have never used Hotmail, I have been experiencing similar issues regarding automatic filtering and bouncing with Excite, another one of the free email services. Excite has become so unreliable over the past few years that I have been forced to move away from them for any serious money-making endeavors and am now gradually making the transition to Gmail. This has been a real headache because I have been with Excite for many years, all the way back to the days when I thought that Spam was something that came out of a can and consisted mostly of ham and pork shoulder. This means that I need to go through hundreds of PTC sites, email lists, traffic exchanges, survey companies, and all of the other programs that I am still registered with under the Excite address and switch them over to Gmail one by one.
Read the rest of this entry »

Two days ago, while reading through some of the recent posts on the StartXchange blog, I discovered a new program called Advertising KnowHow. It’s owned by Robert Puddy, one of the fairly big names in the Internet marketing world and is somewhat difficult to categorize because it combines several different kinds of marketing methods under the same site. Probably the best way to characterize this is as a kind of all-in-one marketing platform. It includes a manual traffic exchange component, but is also a list builder, article submitter, downline builder, and affiliate program.

The traffic exchange part works a little differently from most other exchanges that I have seen. It has a 10 second timer and keeps track of your credits and page views like one would normally expect, but in order to click to the next site there is a little “floating surfbar” that slides onto the screen as soon as the timer runs out. It is approximately the same size as a standard banner and slides in from any side of the screen much like a glide-in or fly-in hover ad. The “click here” button is located on this floating banner, randomly mixed in with three “not here” buttons as a kind of anti-cheat feature. An interesting little perk to this exchange is that it is possible to pick up random referrals even as a free member if you surf at least 50 pages per day for five or more of the past seven days. An email that I received from them earlier today helps explain this:
Read the rest of this entry »

With the population of Internet users constantly growing and continually evolving, it is important to know how to use online marketing strategies effectively in order to increase one’s wealth and influence. Of course, there are many different methods for marketing your products, services, and opportunities on the Internet; however, attempting to cover them all would take up too much space for a single article. But if you already have a website or perhaps even a blog like this one, I have found that there are three major categories of things that you can do to get your Internet marketing ball rolling.
Read the rest of this entry »

One method of promotion that is sometimes overlooked by Internet marketers is that of the simple press release. Through online distribution centers such as PRweb.com, it is possible to generate a significant amount of traffic and inbound links to your website by sending out a well-crafted press release. However, since most media outlets have some type of editorial process usually involving human editors at some level, it is important that your document is written according to professional journalistic guidelines so that it stands a good chance of actually being published. Here are 10 things to keep in mind when writing your “killer” copy:

1. Keep the tone of your content on a professional level. In other words, no abusive language, personal attacks, silly stunts, or anything else that would be generally regarded as unprofessional should appear in your final draft. You can use a certain amount of light humor if it seems appropriate for your genre, but if it does not look like you’re capable of communicating in a professional manner, your letter is unlikely to make it past the editor’s trash can.

2. Use the proper format. There is actually a certain format that press releases are supposed to follow according to generally accepted journalistic standards. Here’s the scoop:

Headline: Often called the “hed” in journalistic jargon, this should be written in a way that captures the editor’s attention and entices further reading.

Dateline: This indicates the name of the city from which the press release is being sent and the date of its publication.

Body: The standard convention is to begin with your most important points first, then move on to secondary information. You should aim to cover the five basic questions: who, what, where, when, and why.

Company Boilerplate: You may write a brief history of your company here, including any relevant products or services.

Contact Information: Provide basic information such as the name, address, phone number, and website URL that you want to use for receiving inquiries from the media and general public.

The End: In a press release, the end of the text is indicated by placing “###” at the end of the very last sentence.

3. Don’t be overly promotional. Remember that it’s supposed to be a press release, not a sales letter. You don’t need lots of puffed-up ad copy; a straightforward, plain English style will suffice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just as things were sailing along smoothly for me in the June contest at Medieval Hits, a relatively new member named Marina Afanasyeva suddenly managed to collect enough referrals to win first place in the daily competitions for the past two days. Although this was quite unsettling (I had won first place for most of the previous days), the admin allowed her to write up a quick summary of how she managed to gain all of these referrals in such a short time and displayed it under the daily updates on our member page. As I had suspected when I saw the numbers, this success was the result of her previous efforts in list building.
Read the rest of this entry »

Although often criticized by webmasters, the Alexa traffic ranking is still viewed by many in the general public as an indicator of a website’s importance. More importantly for Internet marketers, it is used as a gauge for estimating a site’s advertising value. In this article, I will discuss the importance of the Alexa system and its weaknesses as it relates to marketing and website promotion. Then I will list 10 simple ways in which you can increase both your Alexa rank and your income potential. These methods were derived from an excellent article found at DoshDosh.com entitled 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank.

What exactly is the Alexa rank?

The Alexa rank is a system that collects historical traffic data from users of the Alexa toolbar or Firefox Search Status extension and uses this to determine the relative rankings of websites for the previous three months. It is based on the combined total of global reach and page views for each site. The reach is a percentage of all Internet users who visit your site within a specific time period (usually 3 months). Page views are determined by calculating the number of pages within each website that are visited by users of the toolbar within a 24-hour period.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, while searching through some of my regular blog sites, I followed a link to a site called TylerCruz.com and discovered an almost unbelievable case of affiliate marketing failure. After a 15-day “plunge” into the world of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, this site owner managed to lose $927.70 and even posted this screenshot to “brag” about it.

While it is normally not very nice to criticize another webmaster like this right out of the box, I am hoping that in this particular case we can extract some positive lessons from it. This little experiment has provided an excellent case study for newbies who may be considering a similar foray into the world of affiliate marketing. As I see it, our test subject here has made five classic newbie mistakes that we can use as learning opportunities in our quest for money-making enlightenment.

1. Jumping into an overly competitive niche

Tyler’s first mistake was choosing four niches that already had lots of competition. This almost always spells trouble for beginners. They will either wind up paying too much per click and lose money, or they will get very few impressions for their ads because they will not be able to make it onto the first page of Google AdWords, Overture, etc. Tyler managed to do both of these; he only got one impression for his ads on the first day even though he had lots of keywords. Then in an effort to get more clicks, he raised his bid prices to ridiculously high levels (he was up to $3 cost per click at one point). Not surprisingly, the results were unfavorable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I was checking out a site called Helium and found a particularly useful post on the forum there that gives us some clues about how to make money by writing articles and getting paid for them.

The original thread starter, posting under the username of “flashemolecule”, discovered that although it is possible to build up a small income over time by writing good quality articles and publishing them at Helium, much more money can be made by using those same articles and selling them to other sites that will pay people for writing content. Fortunately, although Helium retains lifetime usage rights to your article after it has been published on their site (unless you specifically ask them to remove an article and they agree to it), they do not claim exclusive rights, which means that we have the opportunity to build up multiple streams of income from the same article. For example, if you write an article at one site and manage to make $5 from it, you can probably make that same amount or more by selling the same article to other sites such as Constant-content or Associated Content.

Read the rest of this entry »