Bum Marketing

That sounds like a great idea, test products using article marketing, if you have success then seek it further.

Cool thank you, and yes I will start my own blog or website also but I won't be able to conquer those very highly searched keywords with my website until later.

What I'm doing is stuff like Angela, ranking for keywords like her "backlinks" keyword. Although mine are a little more long tail and less competetive.

hmm interesting because I am ranking nr.9 for a keyword with 70,000 searches a month.
And that's after submitting it the day before (yesterday of course) and building just a few backlinks.
And its not even on a site as strong as Ezine Articles.

Now I just have to bring it to rank 1,2 or 3 at first.

So let me get this clear, if I can't with my article, and no others go for it, then who does? I would think that a lot of empty keywords would be there.
Hmm.

Well then you better get working if no one else goes for it.

How long have you been trying to do SEO? If you look hard enough you'll find plenty with low competition.

I'd like to meet these smart article marketers you're talking about, where do you find them?

Here's an example I found in 10 seconds:

1300 searches per day, 8K comp in quotes.

Can you believe it? An ezine article on first page with one back link.

"tattoo designs of zodiac signs"

Again interesting, and my article is in a huge niche.
Dude nope there are huge amounts of highly searched keywords you can dominate.
I have just now gotten 20 articles written for me, 2 for each keyword. I just did a little keyword research.
No established top domain pages ranking, just other articles and such. Will be a peace of cake.

BTW this is ALL based of Google's keyword tool.
Besides I have proof they are highly searched by looking at other articles I've seen that have multi thousands of views. Some over a hundred thousand. And I've checked their backlinks, peace of cake.

I know what you mean though, I've seen those companies dominating keywords that would be very hard to compete with.

THANK YOU
I wish I could give you 1,000 thanks and a billion dollars.

I was JUST semi realizing this right now and your post just gave me the 100% reassurance to NOT use article directories.

Making my website ASAP, RIGHT NOW.

Thanks!!!

I'd go one better. Put the article on your blog that has the keyword in the title. Blogs still rank higher and faster. The blog can have your offer as well as any subscription boxes as well.
Dennis Francis
DiD Publishing Inc.

If you put your own articles on a blog you update frequently and submit your RSS feed around to aggregators, you can get crawled every day too. The PR 6 is a nice trick, but the only real benefit you or I can get from that is via that backlink, so yes, put an article there if you like, but make sure and point it to your own property.

You MIGHT be able to make some money as a bum marketer, but it should really be used as a promotional strategy for a site you own, and treat it as a backlinking activity rather than the repository for your content/the place you make your pitch.

There's just WAY too much distraction on an article directory. The only valuable thing they offer me that's WORTH my content is a backlink, and even that is arguable.

Sure you can rank in the SERPs from fast (sometimes) from posting in the directories, and sure you can get good at writing the article footer so people will click over to you. But that requires testing and skill, as you said.

All you need to do to work on getting rankings as good or better than ANY article directory is have the content on a site you control, and build backlinks. That's it. (Including ezine - it's REALLY easy to outrank ezine - I challenge anyone to try it).

In my experience, EVERY TIME an article in a directory ranks on the first page for a keyword, it's because NO OTHER site on that results page is optimizing for it correctly. It's always by default.

And building backlinks to someone else's article directory is just insane to me - you know WHY they have that PR 6 ranking? You know WHY they find it easy to rank by default for so many phrases? It's because people choose to link to them for FREE. Sounds crazy to me, but YMMV.

I'd rather make money for myself than help them get AdSense clicks off of my hard work.

Again, an ezine article might indeed get ranked fast. But there's very little profitable opportunity for you on that real estate. You get the one backlink.

It's like you're taking a wonderful low competition keyword and giving it to Ezine FOR FREE to put their ads all over it. Now THEY rank for that awesome keyword YOU FOUND. Ezine would NEVER have EVER ranked for that keyword if you hadn't given it to them. And now that you have, if YOU ever want to rank above them, you've created your own competition!

Add to that you've taken a keyword that has LOW competition in the SERPs (where you have a chance at making a profitable transaction with the searcher) and basically REMOVED yourself by one step (now the searcher has to go THROUGH ezine to get to you) and INCREASED your competition for that keyword because now your one little link has to fight with all the ads on that article directory page.

You know who writes the PPC ads in the content network? Marketers that are generally a LOT better at converting than the person trying to make a sale from pure "bum" marketing.

And if, as you say, it's all about speed for the newbie, that's just a crock too, frankly. Because the newbie is NOT going to be able to write articles good enough to convert without lots of experience and wasted effort. You too can rank on page 1 and make NO MONEY AT ALL! (Where as I pointed out, Ezine actually stands to make more with an ad click if the article is BAD at converting that resource box click for the author.)

And the newbies aren't going to learn keyword research without lots of trial and effort either, but when they go the bum route, they don't even get the benefit of these mistakes because they've given ALL that work to the directories. All the tested keywords, all the content.

Meanwhile, the article directories can laugh all the way to the bank. No matter what way you look at it, bum marketing just doesn't make sense if you're not treating it as just a backlink building method.

Or possibly to put your article in front of potential publishers, but that's rare since hardly anyone wants to republish directory content due to a popular misunderstanding about the dreaded "duplicate content penalty" unicorn.

The business model you speak of does work ofcourse, but as far as I understand it, using the directories for the main reason they were created works best for adsense, and the business model you describe is also aimed at adsense. I would never put adsense on my preselling page, few pennies compared to a $80 sale.

I originally said good writers can make a living online with only EZA because some acually do, it's not what I mainly use. I like wordpress & squidoo.

Indeed man, I like a scrappy debate.

You MIGHT find my blogs if you have the right keywords, but you'd have to know what they were first. Since ezine shows me the article view stats, I can use Google to figure out which articles have the most views.

Once I do that, then I can take that URL into Google's keyword tool and do the "from URL" option to find out what words Goolge thinks the page is ranking for. Then I take those and go to SpyFu and see how much people have been paying to place ads on them for how long.

Also, you can see what advertisers come up on ezine's copy of the article, and then look those guys up on SpyFu to see what other words they're targeting.

Now here's the cool part - don't just try to rank your copy of the article for the phrases that ezine does - take ALL the ones from SpyFu that you have, and build backlinks with ALL those words.

The point of using duplicate content is not only to outrank other copies for the same keywords. There's plenty of possibility there.

As for giving the author a backlink, yeah - I bet a lot of authors are thrilled that I republished their article because now they're actually getting some traffic because I rank my copy for more keywords than ezine does.

And sure, some folks might leave via that footer link, but they have much more of a statistical likelihood of leaving via one of the ads (at least in looking at my own stats).

But hey, different strokes for different folks. If "bum" marketing works for you, and it works for others, by all means, keep at it. It's just more material for me to do what I do with. Heck, there's arleady more than I can actually even use myself.

P.S. Another cool side effect of ezine is that you can monitor their feeds to spot trends in content. When you spot that, look for recurring trends in what the footer links point to. I told you already how to find good converting keywords for the content, but now you know what products are actually selling, too.

Most people promoting stuff on ezine or either affiliates (who you can compete with) or vendors (who probably have affiliate programs if they are savvy enough to be article marketing in the first place).

The fastest way to making money is to copy as much as you can of what's working. Ezine and other article directories combined with the popularity of the Bum method make that very easy to discover if you just watch and track over time.

I also detect that you think it's not possible to get an authority site using nothing but duplicate content. I challenge you to try. Most article directories manage to be authority sites and they're largely terrible at external SEO, AND rife with duplicate content themselves.

Same with lots of news sites (though news sites are better at backlinking via syndication).

But none of my sites are strictly republished articles from a single source, so if that was inferred, my bad. I use free articles, PLR, some feed based stuff mixed with some randomized original stuff, all combined to create the convincing illusion of a well tended, somewhat mediocre, but at least comprehensive niche news/resource site.

It works for me all day long, and for me anyway, it's easier than having to figure out how to get so good at writing articles that I have to be able to overcome all those competing ads. It's just easier. I'm not so much against the bum method, it's just that it seems to be so much work for so little potential reward, where putting things on your own sites can ONLY pay off more and more if you put in the work.

That's because you've sent me 3 already today, and you did ask numerous questions per PM. Sorry man, I like to help but give me a break. Unless you want to pay me a consulting fee, you can wait to get an answer until I AM READY to do so, not when you DEMAND it. And then you ask the same thing here in the thread, too. Give me a break.

And seriously, DO NOT PM ME AGAIN to apologize or I won't answer the other 3 you sent me. Hold your horses and try and put your enthusiasm on the backburner. I have other things to do today besides talk to you.

I think that a lot of folks confuse the point of backlinking to the sites that link to you. You only want to do that so that the linking site gets indexed and your link gets counted in the search engine database.

A lot of times, you don't even have to build a backlink, just go take the URL of the page your link is on and submit it to a ping site. Or better yet, make a comment with a backlink and make sure it shows up in their comment RSS feed. Then take that feed URL and submit it to feed aggregators. That's even better if if you're using blog comments to get backlinks.