Why Do They Call It Bum Marketing?

When I first started to dabble in Internet marketing it became clear pretty early on that it was all about links, so the next thing I had to figure out was where to get them which lead me to the article directories. The concept couldn’t be any easier, you write an article put your links in it and submit it to one of the directories. With a little more research I started to come across the term “bum marketing” which in truth was a little off putting at the time. Since then I have learned a lot and realized a lot about article submission and now when I see the term bum marketing it brings a smile to my face because if the person really knew the potential of article marketing they wouldn’t refer to it that way, so I can only conclude that they either don’t know how to use it properly or they just overlooked this tactic in favor of a more glamorous method.

The concept has remained the same for years and all you really need to do it is to be able to string a few sentences together, because let face it these sites aren’t the most critical when it comes to grammar. With that said article marketing can be so much more if you know how to do it properly.

Getting one link from the article directory is okay but what you should be aiming for is to get links from your articles that have been syndicated out to other sites. Doing this can mean you will see new links dipping into your site for weeks, months or even years. Article directories will never be the golden goose of link building, it’s true you can still get new links from articles that you published months ago but think about it. The quality of the sites that the new links are coming from probably aren’t going to be great if they are syndicating content from an article directory, but if it only takes me 30 minutes to write an article that will keep new links dripping into my site for at least a couple of months then I think it’s time well spent.

The question is how to do it?

Baiting your article…

The article doesn’t need to be written in perfect English, it doesn’t need to contain reams and reams of well researched content. What’s it does need to do is pass the approval process. This will at least get you one link from the article directory; but to have any chance of getting it syndicated you need to bait the article so that it will be picked up. Most webmasters that want content from these directories don’t want to spend much time looking for it, for that reason they will either grab the RSS feed for a category or use a scraper to pull down the types of articles they want.

Baiting your article properly is one of the most effective ways to get it syndicated, to do this you need to work the right keywords to your article, try and add them to your title, tags and content. Another tactic to use is to try and work in the category name to the body of your content this should give you an extra chance of getting it picked up. If webmasters are using scrapers to find the articles they want they will be using keywords to do it and this is when the baiting comes into play.

When you publish to Ezinearticles to help give your article an extra push after it has been approved you can try and get it into the “most viewed” list for the category you have chosen, doing this will ensure that a link to your article will be on every other articles page in your category for the next 60 days. To get your article in this list it needs to have enough views and depending on what category you are writing under it could be anything from a couple of hundred views to a couple of thousand.

To give your article that push it needs submit it to some bookmarking sites, like Stumbleupon and Digg in particular. If this doesn’t do it for you then you can go one step further with Stumbleupon and create a campaign which will drive all the traffic you need, it’s going to cost though, about five cents a click but doing this will get your article so much more exposure and a much better chance of getting syndicated out to other sites.

Another thing that you need to be aware of is that many of the webmasters that do decide to take your article will automatically strip out the anchor text link, to get around this in some part at least you may need to sacrifice one of your links and replace it with a pure HTML link back to your site, again this can be stripped out but it is giving you a far greater chance of getting a proper link back to your site.

The final tip is which directories to use and in truth there are only two reliable ones from my experience, Ezinearticles and Articlebase.  Isnare used to be pretty reliable but has gone downhill a lot. They do however still offer a paid syndication service which still works pretty well and doesn’t cost much to.

Well there you have it a really simple technique that will ensure you get the most out of your article marketing.