Newbie Starting Bum Marketing - Q's to Clarify Fears About Competing Number Sites, etc.

Hi Everyone, this is Chris in Southern California.

My apologies in advance -- I'm a total newbie and dummy when it comes to internet marketing. I have just started my first "bum marketing" effort with a couple of test ads built around a simple, specific keyword phrase -- on USFreeAds and Craigslist, for affiliate marketing.

Okay, here's the situation / problem: For this little test I targeted a keyword phrase that, without quotes, has huge competition -- tons of sites, something ridiculous like 2,600,000 results. Yet, optimizing for the phrase I am using shows that I am supposedly doing really well IF I query Google with the phrase in quotes. In fact, I'm way up there if I go further and query Google for "allintitle" and "allinanchor". But to cut to the chase, here's the problem -- those two little ads are, I assume, buried way back in the TRUE RESULTS. I keep hearing that if we optimize well on a page for title, header, etc., we can supposedly beat a lot of the other sites for THAT phrase. But my observation is that there are still so many sites that are rightfully beating me for reasons OTHER than being optimized or not for that phrase -- probably they are ranking due to back links, opt-in forms, tons of other factors -- regardless of all the "junk sites" out there, there are obviously many sites that achieve rankings.

But getting back to Bum Marketing which is my intent for this test, I know that simply putting up a little ad even well optimized for a particular phrase won't cut it if there are so many competing sites out there. Yet I keep hearing that we can do this in "Bum Marketing", doing USFreeAds, the Ezines, etc.

Anyway, I'm hoping this is obvious, but my question is this: if I am right in believing that my supposedly well optimized little ad can't compete because of all those tons of search results out there, what lower number of competing sites should I realistically try to compete against? Let's say a niche keyword WITHOUT QUOTES gets only 1000 results, maybe 200? I mean, at some point my ad should show up on Google's first page for bum marketing? You see, it does me no good seeing how high I can supposedly rank WITH QUOTES on if in reality, I'm buried way back there!

Anyway, this was just a first test, and I deliberately chose a high results term. My problem is that I have to choose very soon whether I can justify all this time (even though "bum marketing" is supposedly a "quick" shortcut) sitting in front of this computer UNLESS it works! If I can actually make even a pittance at first, then I will continue. I'm thinking as my next test I should choose a very low competition phrase -- I just want to see what it takes to get good ranking using Bum Marketing. Then I will be glad to go further with internet marketing. I'm just really burned out from all my job hunting (was laid off!) AND this nonsense -- which I hope ISN'T nonsense if I can get something happening!

Oh, and another thing -- when I read advice about "you should target phrases that get less than 1000 results for USFreeAds", or up to 5,000 - 10,000 results for Ezines, whatever, I'm assuming that this advice assumes those results are ALL results WITHOUT QUOTES?! I don't believe we have to worry only about competition from sites that display for keywords within quotes, but for ALL RESULTS.

Wow, thanks so much for bearing with me! If anyone out there could sort of affirm what I'm reading into all this -- or even contradict me if I'm wrong -- I'd really appreciate it.

Take care,

Chris