Bum article marketing is a way of making money on the internet. It is one of the most popular ways for new internet marketers to make money.

The term bum marketing was popularized by Travis Sago, a marketer from Arkansas in the USA. It happened when he was writing a free ebook about how to write and submit articles to make money as an affiliate. When he told his wife about it, she said the method sounded so cheap and easy that even a bum could do it.

So that’s why Travis (or rather, his wife) named his ebook the Bum Marketing Method(TM). It was so successful that bum marketing quickly became a synonym for article marketing among internet marketers.

So what is the bum article marketing method and why is it considered so easy? Well, the basic idea is that you pick out an affiliate offer where you can earn money from commissions if people buy through your affiliate link.

For example it might be an ebook about how to lose weight, where you get paid 50% of the purchase price for each buyer that you send. You would write articles, and put your affiliate link at the end. The idea is that when people click through, you can earn a commission.

Done in this way, bum article marketing is completely free. There is no cost at all except your time. It is also extremely easy to do, even for somebody with no technical knowledge of the internet. You do not even need a website.

However, the top article directories soon began to ban affiliate links in articles. This meant that you would have to have a website. It could still be quite simple to redirect to your affiliate link but it was no longer a completely free method. You would need at least one domain, web hosting, and the basic knowledge of how to do a redirection.

Article marketing is still a simple and effective affiliate marketing method, but this means that it needs to be done a different way by the homeless person with no credit card working out of a public library … the type of person that Travis Sago considered could follow his bum article marketing method. They can still do it for free, they just have to set up a free Blogger or WordPress.com blog and direct their resource box links there.

The downside of bum article marketing is that you have to do a lot of writing. It is not easy for people who hate writing or people for whom English is not their first language. While it may be possible to find article directories that will accept articles in other languages, the market is smaller.

Of course it is possible to hire somebody to write for you, but this makes it more expensive. Before you do this you need to have done some testing so that you know that the affiliate offer will convert for you. Then you can hire writers and be pretty sure that you will make a profit on your bum article marketing without having to do any writing yourself.

That’s the final post for now on article marketing. I’ll write more in future as and when new ideas and services are developed. I hope you enjoyed the series. Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions about article marketing.

Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to bring traffic to your site, whether you are promoting your own product or service or making money from affiliate commissions.

The great thing about article marketing services is that you do not need to do the time consuming work of writing and submitting your own promotional articles. Instead, you can outsource it all.

In most cases you will be looking for two kinds of article marketing services. First, you can hire somebody to write articles for you. There will be a cost for this of course, but for most marketers, it is worth the time that you save. The only exception would be if you enjoy writing and can do it well. In that case, you might want to spend your time writing and outsource some other aspects of your business. I’ve found writers on Scriptlance amongst other places.

There is another reason that you might want to hire or join one of the many article marketing services that you can find online. This would be for the submission of your articles to the directories.

Submitting articles is a real dull, time consuming job that hardly anybody likes to do. It is also very easy. So it is ideal for outsourcing to article marketing services or individuals who may be willing to do this for you for very good rates.

Of course, it is possible to use software to submit your articles. The problem is that most of the software has at least one of these two main faults. First, it may not include the best known directories such as EzineArticles and ArticlesBase.

Second, it can be difficult to have the software submit your articles to the correct category, because the different directories organize their categories and give them different names. For example, if your article is about forex trading, the appropriate category may be called ‘forex trading’ in one directory, ‘currency trading’ in another, and ‘foreign exchange’ in another; while other directories may not have this category at all, so you have to select ‘finance’ or ‘investing’.

This kind of selecting is something that can only be done by a human looking at the list of categories on every individual article directory site. Therefore, many marketers prefer to hire article marketing services that offer a manual submission service. This means that a human being will go through a list of article directories submitting your article to all of them, one by one.

If you outsource your article writing to a company rather than individual writers, you may find that they will also offer a submission service. This can save you a lot of time and energy. Instead of having to check the articles when they arrive from the writer, then send them on to somebody else to submit for you, you simply place your order and the whole thing is done for you.

I’ve used a number of article distribution and submission services and like Unique Article Wizard and Free Traffic System best.

Of course, that may work out a little more expensive, but what you save is time that you can profitably spend on other areas of your business. This is always the main advantage with article marketing services.

So what is the typical article marketing keyword density? Or does keyword density really matter at all? These are questions that many new and not so new article marketers are asking every day.

Back in the day, marketers used to turn out hundreds of badly written articles repeating the same keywords over and over. At that time, the search engine algorithms were very basic. Search engines used to assume that any article that contained the keyword many times must be very relevant, and give it top position in their results. But of course, that led to people gaming the system, which in turn made the search engines develop more sophisticated ways of ranking web pages.

These days, the results are based on a combination of keywords, other related words and phrases (latent semantics), and many other factors. Of course, it is still important to have your target keyword appear in a typical article marketing submission, and appear more than once. But where exactly should you put it?

Typical article marketing principles say that your main keyword must be in your title. In fact, it is best if it forms the very first words of your title.

It also needs to be in the first line of the article, as near to the beginning as possible. Also, it’s good if it appears in the last paragraph. Then you want it to appear a couple more times. In total, the keyword should appear approximately once for every 100 words of the article (not counting the title), or a little more.

So that is a keyword density of 1% to 1.5%. This will be fine with typical article marketing directories. On your own website, you can go higher if you want. But ezinearticles.com, for example, will probably reject your article if the keyword density is over 2%.

Make sure that similar keywords appear in the article too. So if your main keyword is ‘article marketing’ then it’s good to have phrases like ‘affiliate marketing’, ‘internet marketing’ and ‘writing articles’ appear in your article. This will please the search engines and draw more visitors who were searching for those terms.

Something else that will help you is to have your keywords in bold. Again, this is easy on your own website. It is a little harder if you are submitting to the article directories, because they may not like a lot of random bold type in your articles.

The way to get around this is to divide your article into sections, and add a heading before each section. Bold the headings (which looks completely natural) and have your keyword appear in one or two of the headings. Automatically you have your keyword in bold in the article.

Extra tip: this is also a great way to handle the situation where you have a weird sounding keyword that is hard to put into a normal flowing sentence: for example, ‘train dog’. You don’t often say ‘train dog’, do you? It’s usually train YOUR dog, train THE dog, etc. But you can put ‘train dog’ into a subsection heading. Most article directories will see that as a typical article marketing subheading and approve it.

In this post we will look at how to write your resource box in order to get the best results. Article marketing can be extremely effective and can bring in huge amounts of money, if you do it regularly and do it in the right way.

But if you get this wrong, you can waste a lot of time. Make sure you are rewarded for your marketing efforts by paying close attention to all of the tips in this article marketing tutorial.

Article marketing has two purposes. One is to get backlinks for SEO. For that, the only thing in the resource box that matters is the actual link. Most marketers use a keyword phrase as anchor text because this will increase the ‘weight’ of your link in the eyes of the search engines.

For example, if your site is about removing warts, you might hyperlink the words ‘wart removal’ or ‘get rid of warts’.

This is OK as long as you make sure that the words around the link tell people what to do (i.e. click on it). Remember, they are much more likely to do something if you tell them to!

This is known as a ‘call to action’ and it can be done by saying something like ‘Click here to download our free report on Wart Removal’, where ‘Wart Removal’ is the linked text. That way you get your keyword phrase in as the anchor text for SEO, but you have also explicitly told people to click on it.

However, always keep in mind the second purpose of article marketing. This is to attract real human visitors who will click through the links in your resource box to reach your site. From there, they can buy your product, opt in to your list, register on your forum, click on your Adsense ads or affiliate links, or do whatever else you want them to do.

When it comes to human visitors, remember that you may get a better click through rate if you hyperlink the words ‘click here’ for at least one of your links. People are so used to seeing ‘click here’ that they will often do it automatically or just to see what happens.

Let’s move on to consider something else that matters to your human visitors in the next section of this article marketing tutorial. That is the feeling that they are getting something valuable that is not available anywhere else.

This aspect of marketing is known as creating a Unique Selling Point or USP. It is so important to the marketing of products that virtually all books on marketing and advertising will talk about it.

The important thing to remember in this aspect of our article marketing tutorial is that having a USP is not only important for selling products and services – it is important for having people do anything that you want them to do, including clicking on the link in your resource box.

So it is not enough to tell people to ‘click here for more information about wart removal’. They can find more information about wart removal anywhere! In fact, right there on the page in the article directory where they are reading your article, they can probably see the directory owner’s Adsense boxes displaying all kinds of wart removal ads. In order to get their click, you have to compete with those ads and win!

You can do that by offering something exclusive and unique that your visitors cannot find anywhere else (or at least, that’s what you’re going to tell them if you follow our advice in this article marketing tutorial). It could be a free report or series of tips that is only available from your site, or something that people can view on your site such as a video. It may only be an embedded YouTube video, but you can easily make it sound exciting and unique!

Or if you are writing about a disease or condition, how about a picture gallery? Anybody who has warts wants to see pictures of other people’s warts! In fact, even people who don’t have warts will want to see those pictures!

Of course, you should take care not to use any pictures that you don’t have permission for, but you will find it is worth paying a few dollars for five or six wart pictures from a stock photo site. People love seeing pictures of unsightly diseases and having a page on your site called ‘wart photo gallery’ will attract tons of visitors.

Finally, you will want to make sure that you can easily refer to these resource box tips next time you are submitting an article. So go ahead and bookmark this article marketing tutorial now!

Anybody looking for the secrets of success with article marketing needs to know about keywords. Used correctly, keywords can give your article a huge boost. This means you have the potential to earn a lot more money. But if you choose the wrong keywords, your article will be lost in the world wide web’s garbage heap.

So what are the secrets of choosing the right keywords? Here are the two main points that students of article marketing need to get right.

1. Traffic and competition: the niche

First you will need to do some basic keyword research to even be sure that you are promoting something that people are interested in.

For example, you may have discovered a really cool ebook about how to make money with article marketing. The sales page looks professional and you think it will convert very well. But you need to be sure that there are people out there searching for information on how to do article marketing.

When it comes to traffic, the best plan is to write articles on keywords that are getting from 200 to 2000 monthly searches. More than that and the competition is probably too intense. Less and you will not have many people reading your articles.

However, do keep in mind that a large percentage of internet searches are on totally new keyword phrases. If you ever look at website stats you will see that most times, your visitors do not arrive by searching for the exact keyword phrase that you were targeting.

So if you write a good article that is relevant for your subject, you may pick up all kinds of traffic that you did not expect. Nevertheless, you also need to think about whether these visitors will buy, and that’s where the next point is important for article marketing students.

2. Keywords relevant to the product

It may seem obvious that you will need to base your articles on keywords that are relevant to your subject area. For example, if you are promoting an article marketing basics ebook, you want to attract people who are hoping to make money online.

But you need to be more precise than that in order to attract people who will actually buy the product. Think about what the product does and who would be most successful using it.

In this case, the target market is people who can write English, have some time available, want to make money online and don’t already know a lot about article marketing (since the product is about article marketing).

So the best keywords will be the ones that target those people. Article marketing basics, make money online from writing, article marketing for beginners … that kind of thing.

Of course, it is important to attract visitors who are prepared to buy, not just those who are looking for free information. For this reason, you could start by being very specific and writing a review of your product, targeting the keyword ‘product name review’, or use the keyword ‘buy product name’.

You may want to do this even if you find practically zero results for those keywords in your research. The visitors who do come will be extremely targeted and are more likely than general visitors to buy the article marketing ebook that you recommend.

There are lot of tools out there to help with keyword research. My personal favourite is Keyword Elite which really speeds up the process. You can read more about Keyword Elite and keyword research on my Keyword Elite blog