Wow! I ACTUALLY made a Sale!

WEll, whady'know, after 2 weeks of nothing I actually made a sale, I couldn't believe my eyes - I had to look twice! Though it was on a bum article I did nearly two months ago, so the recent challenge efforts didn't play a single part!

Anyway, this coincides with my announcement today that I am putting this project on hold. Why?

Because I am moving flat in little over a week and I need to do some packing. And coming back home to crank out articles usually means that time flies by and it is time for bed in no time.

So, over the next three weeks (it'll take a while for my broadband connection to get back up when I move - this is inefficient England after all) at least I'll post updates of the odd thing such as the odd article written.

I'm also doing a mini experiment so expect to hear about that as well - Adwords. Its kind of like pay per lead effectively. So we'll see how many signups to my list I can get from Adwords, should be interesting. In my ad, I am trying a technique of saying that I offer a signup by email course, so it should mean more clicks turning to leads.

Saying that, I just paused a campaign on a generic keyword because I had 9 clicks and only 1 sign up - even though I blatently pointed out the email aspect! I guess a lot of people don't think about where they click!

Article! 4th Update Saturday

Another 4 articles pumped out, so overall progress for today is:

• 4 articles to my niche blog
• 4 articles to ezinearticles point to the niche blog
• product creation outline finished
• 5 day e-course for niche blog outline finished

I'm also going to change where my bio box links to. So far, I've been linking direct to the main blog page. But what I'm going to do after designing the e-course and opt-in form is to link to a single page containing the opt-in and a simple, "no thanks, let me see the main page" link at the bottom in small letters. I can create several of these and compare the hits on the main page from the opt-in page to the ezinearticles count for outgoing clicks to get a rough conversion rate. I could even split test if I want to.

I don't think I'll change the bio links on my existing posted articles at ezinearticles for now, I'll just leave them as they are.

Also, I noticed that my site is already indexed! Google came visiting yesterday! I'm sure this is because ezinearticles is pointing this way.

So, you can see how the original bum marketing method which relied solely on the article site pages ranking high and providing inbound traffic, can change into a sort of affiliate site with seo. This is Stuart's method and the one I want to replicate.

What Is The Secret Of Bum Marketing Success (Day 11)

Hi all, hope you are well.

Done half an hour product creation work and half an hour bum marketing (1 article).

It is tempting to ditch this Bum Marketing and concentrate simply on product creation.

"Ah, but you haven't even given it 30 days" some of you might say.

That's true, but I would counter with the fact that I have done circa 40 keyword optimised articles with no sales. Is there any point in continuing without changing strategy? And until I have worked that strategy out, I might as well hit my head against a brick wall.

Well, I have not given up as you may have noticed, but I've certainly downscaled my efforts.

Concerning the product creation, I'm quite happy with the way that things are going - this 24 Hour E-Book Writing System is pretty damn good. Though I am tempted to skip some stages, I am giving each one the full half hour work that it deserves.

Anyway, I'm really looking for some solid bum marketing tips that I hope some of you may have. I'm talking about:

• how to write articles
• how to pre-sell in articles
• what kind of style of writing to use in article to get highest click throughs

These are the things that not many people share and, to me, this is how to succeed at bum marketing - knowing the answers to these questions. I welcome any comments you have and advice you can offer, not just me, but the readers of this blog :-)

Day 10 Bum Marketing Challenge Update

Actually today I had planned to do only product creation and also some well overdue chores around the house.

Well its midday here and I have written two direct to merchant linking articles and submitted to ezinearticles. I don't do goarticles because I found that I wasn't getting indexed and with ezinearticles I get indexed in a few days. Also, I'm now on Platinum status which is great.

One thing I have noticed with Wordtracker is the amount of crap keywords. I mean, sometimes there is an obscure six phrase keyword that apparently gets searched 20 times a day! Yeah right! You really have to sift to find the gold because either the popular keywords are too competitive or the apparent gold is fools gold as I have just outlined. Also, some niches are full of searches with the word FREE.

In fact, despite choosing what to write my first product on, I am thinking of changing it already because I think there may be a load of freeloaders or kids in this market who will not buy my product. This would also put potential affiliates off with poor click through rates on keywords. Mind you, this same non-IM niche is one of the top selling on CB and not too competitive. I think I will stick with it and choose a totally different niche for my 2nd product so as to diversify well.

So, how about you? How are your own bum marketing efforts going? I would love to hear about them and if you want to write a post for this blog full of your backlinks, I am more than happy to show it. Remember that there are not too many bum marketing blogs out there (I know because I am always looking for them!) so this is a captive and targetted audience in that sense.

Day 8 Bum Marketing Challenge

No articles for yesterday for reasons I will not go into.

So far today 2 articles via Method 1

3 day weekend here in the UK (Monday is a bank holiday), so hope to pump out a lot of articles.

btw these crap sales are making me think about product creation rather than Bum Marketing.

Even my so-called passion niche is difficult because I do not feel a close affinity with any of the products on Clickbank, which seems to me a great reason to make my own product.

Anyway, will post later today with more progress.

Total articles written today so far = 2.

Day 5 Bum Marketing Challenge Update

Well first of all I checked my CB stats when I got home and disappointed to see yet another day of nothing. But now I've just thought about it...5 days is nothing yet in my challenge, and although I started my bum marketing efforts before the challenge, they were sporadic and nothing like what I am doing now. So I shouldn't be too disheartened.

I regularly look at other blogs, I have named Stuart's and Trevor's below, especially Trevor's I check every day as we are doing the challenge at the same time and hopefully spur each other on to do well.

I also found another one - check it out:

Bum Marketing Adventure - The 120 Day Story

Its a 21 yr old college student (no name??) who has 120 days to kill in the summer and is trying to reach a $10 a day goal. Wow, that would be great money for a student, I remember those days! I hope he reaches his goal - I noticed he is using Squidoo quite a lot as well, something that I am not currently doing.

Anyway, today I felt so tired and drained. My day job involves working various shifts and this week I have been rising very early. It really kills you in the evening. Of course, as you know, I have been caning the articles and doing pretty well for myself. On my way home today I was in some kind of a dizzy daze, totally out of it. Yawning continuously and yet holding a notebook trying to write an article on a niche, whilst balancing on one leg on a train! People must have thought I looked like cr@p!

I aborted that article so I've written one today and don't feel like anymore. I think I need to give myself a rest. I'm going to get to sleep on time tonight and maybe right one or two articles. Sometimes, you just need to chill out and relax after continuous working and I think that tonight could be the night.

So I think I might just do some leisurely keyword research tonight as my Wordtrack week's subscription runs out soon, and maybe start my niche "passion" blog as well.

Later

Day 4 Bum Marketing Challenge Update

Well, on target for today.

Covered the same 5 daily target articles that I did also yesterday. Looks like its taken me just under 2 hours. Not bad. But I still don't have my niche blog up yet.

Maybe I'll do it tonight or maybe tomorrow, I'm not sure. Does anyone have any good affiliate Wordpress templates (I'm not interested in Adsense)?

Oh yeah I looked at my stats again and they are still zilch! I want to swear argh!!!!! I will try not to look at my stats and maybe in a week I will be pleasantly surprised. Or even more pissed off!!!! lol!

I'm also thinking about trying to get my picture on ezinearticles front page! Well not my real pic but maybe I'll nick something from flickr! Haha. Many of those chumps don't realise that they have allowed their pics to be modified and used for commercial means! You can use this tool to find them:

FlickrLilli

Anyway, not much else to report at this stage. Oh, I noticed what people mean by critical mass in Bum Marketing.

I figured that there would be a steady increase in page hits and author link views at Ezinearticles. Actually, I've noticed that my early articles are now increasing very quickly, and the same will happen with the articles I am writing at the moment. So it seems that there will be some kind of exponential wave of traffic!

btw I noticed on ezinearticles that the top authors have varying visits to articles ratios. From maybe 400 hits per article to up to 2000. Now my average is 268 but bear in mind that most of my articles are new and written in the last month so I think this is pretty good. I just hope that enough of these visitors will not only click through but also buy!

Day 3 Bum Marketing Challenge Continued - Quick Update

ok just a quick update, I've got some cleaning to do! Chores don't stop unfortunately!

I reached my target for today. So:

* 2 x articles on two different topics with links to affiliate pages
* 2 x articles to content site containing CB ads and opt-in boxes (this is a secret how I do this, currently an experiment that will be revealed later, I'll call this SECRET METHOD in future)
* 1 x article on new niche page

The only thing about the last article, is that I haven't yet created a blog. Any advice for a blog? I have a lot of experience with Wordpress blogs but I find that they look kind of crappy. To be honest, I don't like reading Wordpress blogs personally, they are flippin everywhere!

PS my Wordtracker subscription runs out in a few days. Tomorrow need to do some KW research!

Day 2 - Bum Marketing Challenge - My Strategy Defined

Well Day 2 is going pretty well. Day 1 was rather strange.

As you know, I write articles going to and from work. This is an amazing tip and I'll tell you why.

On public transport, I normally fall asleep, I can't help it. But by writing on my small notebook, it is surprisingly enjoyable. I do this with my tunes in my ear. I get some funny stares but I don't care! The only thing I need before I head out are a couple of keyword phrases for the 2 articles I will write.

I normally type up my written articles that night but on Friday, well a tough week at work - my job is very stressful - so I typed up on Saturday.

Then I screwed about for a bit and was quite angry at myself for doing this :-( Luckily I saved the day and did some good work in the evening which actually gave me ideas for my strategy.

- I am going to abandon my own product creation until after 30 days. I need to concentrate on this challenge
- I will continue to write 2 articles a day going to/from work. These will link to clickbank products and not include email capturing from an opt-in form
- I will write 2 articles per day that will link to a content site with clickbank ad and opt-in form. This is an experiment to me. I will be using some interesting techniques that I have never heard of before but hope to be successful
- Lastly, I will soon start a passion niche site. No, this has nothing to do with porn or s3x ;-) I have noticed that Steve, Stuart and Trevor have started by having only one site from fresh, but something that they are very passionate about. I am quite knowledgable so enjoy writing about many things but I really need a no.1 passion that also has a product on Clickbank, then start to write about it. Stuart showed that from a single niche alone, one can fulfil this challenge. That is my objective.

Maybe sounds like too much but remember:

- no more product creation
- 5 articles. 2 of which written on the train, 2 of which I will use an interesting technique to write very quickly. 1 of which will be about something I love. I think this is achievable.

All this and I will be moving out of my apartment in one month. Yikes, these things always come in twos!!

End of Day 1 - Challenge Report

Maybe I should save this for day 2!

Anyway, today I created a mini-site. Basically, I will link to this site in my ezinearticles.com articles.

This site I built in XSite Pro. It features a picture and text link to the clickbank product in the right margin, a text link in the footer and an opt-in page on every page in the center.

It took me about 1.5 hours to build though!

Is this normal? I noticed some opt-in pages for bum marketing are a blogger blog with just 3 articles posted maybe. Is this enough? It would seem to me that people will not bother opting in if they see that the page looks lightweight. By the way, I'm not talking about 1-page sales pages or pre-sales pages here for opt-in purposes. Unless, maybe this is what I should be creating? Would certainly take less time. I'd appreciate your feedback.

Cheers

From Zero to $4500 in 30 Days Challenge!

I've been inspired by a few blogs recently.

I saw Steve Rowland's blog, Online Cash Cow, and I was amazed to see just how close to completing this challenge he was. I mean, when he posts his daily results and I see hundreds of dollars a day being made, all in the first month, my jaw dropped!

I should also mention the blogs of Stuart McIntosh, How To Make Money Online And Build A List, who inspired Steve and the blog of Trevor Somerville, 30 Days To Success - With Bum Marketing 100% Free Methods!, who has similarly been inspired by Steve.

Actually, readers of this blog will know that I have already made a bit of money from Bum Marketing, but not too much. So, although it will skew the results a little and I get a slight headstart, I am hardly anywhere near completing the challenge so they are irrelevant earnings in my opinion when compared to this challenge. Hopefully they won't matter in one month's time!

So the challenge starts today Saturday 19 May 2007. Wish me luck!

Yes! More Bum Marketing Sales!

Hi all,

I thought I would share with you, my Bum Marketing is going pretty well.

I must be picking up some good search engine traffic because my bum marketing stats are suddenly doing very well.

Actually, since the last time I wrote, I have had a small vacation and this has upset my rythm and objective for posting an article a day. Trust me, you can't leave everything till the weekend!! It won't work out.

So my motto is "must do one article a day".

And check out my stats, I'm pretty happy with them. In a couple of weeks, I have made what takes me two months to make in Adsense! And it took me over a year to get to that level in Adsense but only about two to three months of Bum Marketing!

So get writing!

Bum Marketing Is Working!

After creating about 20 articles, some good, some bad, and learning a lot along the way, I am finally starting to make some sales. About one sale with Clickbank every 1-2 weeks.

At least now I can see the power of Bum Marketing and that it really works.

After a three day holiday that has disrupted my efforts and set them back about two weeks (argh!), I am going to commit to two things - bum marketing and product creation.

Both require the same - lots of writing!

So I better get on with it!

Later

Finally Posting Articles!

Well I've had 4 days off this Easter, and this is my final day.

I can say that I have been much more productive than I have been in the past. It has been great.

For Bum Marketing, I've posted several of my rentacoder articles to ezinearticles. They all required a quick run through for grammatical changes. I'm glad I chose three because if I outsource again, I will ignore one of them, the writing and grammar was very poor for this individual concerned.

These articles are already getting approved and I'm posting several a day - will probably have them all done in a week's time.

By the way, Ezinearticles now allow you to link to Clickbank and other affiliate sites. It looks like a recent rule change of theirs. The only caveat is that you must redirect from your own domain, and when you link to it, you must link to the top level and not a sub-page.

This will help a great deal - I guess ezinearticles probably gave in when they saw many other people using sneaky redirects and realised that they couldn't police it.

Yikes Still Not Posted The Articles!

Need to get back on track. At least I have 4 days over Easter coming up......

BUM Marketing Outsourcing Update

An update - 3 projects nearly completed from rentacoder. Unfortunately, 2 of the 3 projects have come back not up to the required standard. I requested a specific keyword density and format of the articles yet this has been ignored!

Well, I don't hand over money until the job is done, but it is very annoying, and these people seemingly have very high ratings! Methinks that people are stroking each others' egos on these sites and giving each other high ratings.

Anyway, I'll let you know what happens.

My other projects which I have been neglecting lately are an Adwords project (that I will hopefully get under way today) and also a Clickbank project, which is to write my own ebook, but on what I do not know.......

Zen and the Art of Outsourcing Article Writing

Not much progress made recently. The weekend was out, as I met with a friend of mine who will be leaving these shores shortly. Although I didn't plan it, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to hang, even though I knew it would hit my articles progress.

Monday was a continuation - all play and no work, same goes for today (Wednesday) though Tuesday was pretty good.

I'm seriously beginning to doubt some of the Wordtracker keywords. Some of the so called gold are such narrow terms that nothing can be written on them!

So back to outsourcing - it has been said that a single bum marketing article will yield one sale per month. So let's assume $30 per article per month. Then, in order to make $30 per day, I would need 30 articles. And in order to reach $150 per day, I would need 5 times that, or 150 articles written.

If we assume an outsourcing cost of $5 per article, then 150 articles will cost a grand total of $750 (about £380).

Now, if these articles yield $150 per day then we break even in about five days! Of course, it will take time for indexing in the search engines so this is a little simplistic but outsourcing does seem to make a lot of sense.

There are a lot of crap writers out there but I am hoping to choose a few writers and get them to write, say, 20 articles each. Then the best writer will get the contract for the remaining articles.

I think I'll still write the author bios though as this is the major selling pitch that I need to retain control of.

Have you had any experience of oursourcing? I'd love to hear from you so please leave your comments and share with all of us.

USFreeAd today for a change...

So today I posted a USFreead for a change. I'm totally knackered because I'm working the early shift at work this week, entails waking at 5am :-0 and I am most certainly not a morning person. I resemble a woken grizzly at that sort of time!

I wrote something on Day Job Killer. Yes, you have probably heard of it but, if not, you will soon - all the gurus are promoting it. I'm sure it's a good product, I mean, I bought Affiliate Project X by the same author and was very impressed, but it is quite sickening when the gurus force it down your throat all day!

I've also promoted it elsewhere, on a non-internet marketing forum that I frequent. It gets some heavy traffic and I have a theory on the target audience that I am testing so it will be interesting to see what kind of response I get. I really wish that Clickbank would show how many clicks your link gets so that you could do more testing and conversion tracking etc. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't see these features.....

By the way, if anyone knows of any good Bum Marketing blogs or RSS feeds, please let me know and I'll add them to the left. Always good to have some useful links.

Thanks

Great Bum Marketing Resources

Many marketers, myself included, are guilty of doing too much research and not enough action. Well, I'm doing well with my commitment so far but it may well be a good idea to do some more research in case I am missing something. After all I have no sales so far :-(

One thing I intend doing is reading all the popular Bum Marketing posts on Warrior forum. Check 'em out here: Warrior Bum Marketing

Just type in bum marketing as an exact search phrase.

That reminds me, good Bums copy ideas. I have found some successful marketers and I know the names that they post under so I shall use some of their interesting and successful ideas. Not plagiarize but I may use some of their keywords - like a true bum, let others do the keyword research for me!

Problem is, at one article per day, I really need to ramp it up if I am going to be able to do my 1st target, 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. with each target being a slightly different method.

There are some people doing 30 articles a day!!! No way I can achieve that - quite apart from working 9 hours a day and taking an hour to get to work and an hour back I have a lack of time but I would also get writers block! But I would love to achieve 10 a day at some point, at least on average, probably ramping it up at the weekend.

So now I will set a new target....when my keyword research is over, I will raise my daily target to two articles. I mentioned this briefly before but this is a new commitment!

Wordtracker Keyword Gems

Still no sales I'm guessing, I'm tempted to not even look at my stats today.

Well I'm ahead of schedule so far. Friday night I was very tired and got an earlyish night, one article written. Saturday I wrote two articles and today (Sunday) three. I originally had a wild plan to do twenty articles this weekend but I knew that wouldn't happen.

One thing that slows me down in that respect is having to do the keyword research. To make the most out of my limited Wordtracker subscription, I'm researching at least one niche per day which obviously eats into my article writing time. I'm hoping that by the end of my subscription, I might be able to raise my daily article quota to two. That alone would mean that I could write the approximately 140 articles remaining (my first objective) in seventy days or a little over two months!

One thing that has struck me about my Wordtracker research is that there are some very obscure terms that have apparently been searched many times. All the more suspicious when you find out that there are no competing pages in Google for the exact terms. So, like Overture, you do have to interpret the results to some extent.

Anyway, off to check my Clickbank stats, I can't resist!