Is Bum Marketing Dead?

Not completely, but before you can use today’s version you need to understand “yesterday’s” version.

Just a few years ago you could trade time for dollars. There were people making $100’s and $1000’s a month using free marketing methods called – Bum Marketing.

What is Bum Marketing?

Bum Marketing is a term that was coined a few years ago when article marketing was in it’s heyday. At one time you could build a network of traffic just by posting content to free websites.

This was using free blogging sites as well as established content sites like Ezine Articles.

Of course this was also the time when you could just copy and paste the same article to several sites and still benefit from the
link-juice. If you wanted “original” content (as suggested for the higher PR rated sites) you needed to SPIN the article and maybe add an original paragraph at the beginning.

You could even get away with article feeds for your site or even steal articles in their entirety and get ahead of the game. It wasn’t too long ago that Google wasn’t able to tell the originator of an article and would give the benefit to the article content sites.

Those were the days! The wild, wild, west of the internet. It was cheap and simple to set up your new blog and the rules for organic traffic were a lot less complicated. Heck you didn’t even need a blog to have an online business.

The Link Exchange

Article marketing was just one way to drive free traffic to your offer or to your site. Link juice was supplied from these content sites and it was OK to have a “link exchange” with other websites. This just meant they would put your link on their site and in return you would do the same for them.

CAUTION: Link exchanges is not an acceptable practice anymore and a good way to have your linked page removed from the Search Engines Listings. Even a one-way link off a “bad” website can cause you harm. The big G frowns on people paying for links too. This was intended to put a stop to the overuse of the Blogging Networks. Google came up with a whole new panic tool called the “Disavow Tool”.

How to Get Free Traffic

The best and most abundant free traffic is search engine traffic. It is more competitive than ever and the old tricks may not work, or at least not be as effective. Done right though, you can still get a fair bit of free traffic from many places all over the web.

The Crux of Bum Marketing

Bum Marketing still has some useable and viable methods of providing traffic to your offer today. There is one simple rule of marketing and that is you must find your “Hungry Crowd”. This will take a little more innovation on your part than just spinning and uploading articles but it will still work.

QUESTION: In your business, who is the customer in the most pain, or the most passionate about a product you have? Then add one more important ingredient.

For example;

Step 1. Choose a niche in your business where you know there is lots of interest.

Step 2. Find a very, very small subgroup in that niche. Don’t expect to make millions of dollars catering to the few but you can build out from here. This is also an excellent way of learning how online marketing ties in with your offline marketing and local business. If you can dominate the tiny niches, why not take what you learn and grow your niches and join in on the heavier competition.

For example just assume you own a hobby store. Perhaps for step one you decide that you want to focus on a hobby like Model Trains. This is a very passionate audience. By choosing a sub-niche in this group you can laser target your audience with less competitive keywords.

When I did a keyword search for Model Train I found a very interesting long-tail keyword “model railroad diorama ho scale”

This is a low competition keyword that could be worth trying to rank for. So let’s investigate a little more.

Promoting Products with Bum Marketing Methods

Finding low competition phrases is one thing, but there also needs to be a product that audience would be interested in buying. No point in sending a bunch of traffic if they aren’t going to pay you money.

Will Bum Marketing Methods Still Work Today?

The short answer is no & yes. One place to go for bummed traffic in this case would be to a forum group. Find where they are chatting about this and join in.

Drive super targeted sub-niche traffic to your specific niche page on your site. Setting up a strategic link building campaign for each micro-keyword can help you stand above the crowd. You can get super micro too like “model trees for train sets”.

Be friendly, helpful, and polite in the forums. The old style of Bum Marketing doesn’t really exist anymore but some of the methods can be effective linking strategies.

Next Steps for Niche Marketing

Explore this sub-niche more and put some effort into promoting a product or two. If you don’t have a website or your store name is too general, it might be worth picking up a few auxiliary websites. Check to see if the keyword is available in a URL. It isn’t as important as it used to be but it certainly doesn’t hurt to be very clear to the SE’s what your site is about.

Finding one long tail keyword is nice, but its to your advantage if there are many so you can eventually tie up the entire niche one low competitive keyword at a time.

Last thing to check before making the plunge and commitment is to see how it is trending. Just use Google’s free trending tool to check your various keywords.