Tip To Help Bum Marketers Determine Keyword Competition

If you are a bum marketer, then you are probably aware of the importance of choosing a long tail keyword phrase that has low competition. The lower the competition, the greater than chance of your article ranking well in the search engine results, and the more page views you will get.

And you are probably aware of how we determine competition. We place the specific keyword phrase within quotation marks into the Google search box.

But did you know that Google has another search function that you use to help you further determine your true competition?

Its called the allintitle function.

To use this function, just type in your keyword phrase within quotes preceded by allintitle. So inside the Google search box should look like this: allintitle: "keyword phrase"

What does this give you? All the results for webpages that have that particular keyword phrase as its title. Not the article title, but the title used for the actual webpage itself.

So how can bum marketers use this info?

Let's say that you have two keyword phrases that you are interested in writing a few articles on. Both these keyword phrases have the same number of daily Google searches (100 searches) and the same number of competing webpages (900 webpages).

Seem pretty even, right?

Now here's where the allintitle function can help. You do an allintitle search for both of the keyword phrases, and discover that the first phrase has 300 results and the second phrase has 50 results.

How do I use this information?

I am going to make an assumption here. I am going to assume that a page that uses the keyword phrase in its title is better optimized for that phrase than pages that use a different title.

So in this case, I would say that the first keyword phrase has more competition than the second one because more of the pages are targeted to it.

Therefore I would write about keyword phrase 2 because I would have a better chance of ranking higher in Google.

Now, this isn't an exact science. I am using these numbers to help estimate competition. Just another tool that you can use (if the need arises).

Best wishes,

JoeMack

Which Bum Marketer Will Make More?

Top level domain name redirect VS Product Review Landing Page

A product review page can greatly increase the conversion rate, but because you are filtering out more people, it may not be more profitable in the short term.

Let's use an example:

Two Warriors are promoting the same affiliate product (which earns them a commission of $45. Let's say over a weeks time, they both generate 500 visitors from their articles.

Warrior A has been doing a top level domain name redirect, so he is sending his traffic from his articles straight to the affiliate salespage. His sales conversion ratio is 2%.

Warrior B send his traffic to a product review landing page. He gets conversion ratio is 5% at the affiliate salespage because he is "softly" preselling the affiliate product.

So who do you think will make more?
My answer is: Warrior A.

Yes, because of the awesome product review that Warrior B gave, his conversion rate is more than double. But...because he added an additional step, he's filtered out some traffic. So of the readers who got to the product review page, how many clicked on the affiliate sales link (your CTR on the review page)?

I would say that it would range in the 15-45% of people clicking the link and getting to the affiliate salespage. For this example, we'll say that its a strong 30%.

Do you see the problem here?

So both Warriors A and B each get 500 people to click on the links in their resource boxes. How much did they make?

Warrior A sends 500 visitors to the affiliate salespage. His conversion ratio is 2%. He generates 10 sales @ $45 each, giving him a weekly commission of $450.

Warrior B sends 500 visitors to the product review page. His product review convinces 30% of the readers (150 of them). His conversion ratio is a superior 5%. He generates 7.5 sales (just for calculation purposes) @ $45 each, giving him a weekly commission of $337.50.

Warrior A made $112.50 more than Warrior B.

So what's the point of this? I guess that you should really play around with numbers to see what actually is the best solution for your income goals.

If you need money quicker, then you are going to want to direct as much traffic as possible to the affiliate salespage.

If you are looking for long-term, stable income than you'll want to add steps along the way (namely capturing their names and email addresses for further communication and relationship building). A mailing list of tightly targeted individuals is a powerful asset.

Best wishes,

JoeMack

One Way To Revive A "Dead" Article

Have you ever had this happen to you?

You find a long tail keyword phrase that gets 200 searches per day on Google, and has under 1000 competing webpages. A well written article based around that keyword phrase should generate some steady page views.

So you write and submit the article. After an initial flurry of pages views, you haven't received a single page view in weeks.

On paper, it should be getting much more exposure.

Well, yesterday I wanted to try an experiment with one of these articles. I wanted to see if I could "generate" more exposure for the article, at least temporarily.

As it stood, it only had 48 page views and 13 click thrus in almost three weeks of publication at EZA. It also hadn't received a new page view in almost two weeks. I was baffled by it.

So I went to Google and typed in "myniche forum". I registered for just two of them. I started a thread that was like, "I just submitted an article about such and such. I was wondering if you guys could read it and let me know what you think of it."

That was it. My other option, especially if I was going to do this on a more consistent basis, would be to link to the article in my sig file.

I saw the results almost instantly.

Before making the posts, my article had 48 page views and 13 click thrus.

After just three hours (on an article that hadn't received a page view in almost two weeks), my stats for that article were now 117 page views and 37 click thrus.

Not only that, but the CTR for this traffic (34.8%) was higher than the normal CTR value (27.1%).

In total, I spent a total of about 20 minutes on this project. Could I have written more posts? Sure. Could I have found more forums? Yes, there were plenty to choose from. I just chose the first two.

One more thing:

This is just my thoughts, not fact. But by linking back to the article, I am not only getting new readers, I am also increasing the amount of backlinks for my article.

And because they are focused (top forums in this niche), this will raise my article in the search engine results. The higher you go, the more page vieews you will get.

I just touched the surface with this strategy. I hope that it gets some people thinking.

Best wishes,

JoeMack

3 Reasons Why Bum Marketers SHOULD Use Pen Names

There are three reasons why bum marketers should use pen names.

Reason #1: Easier to be seen as an "expert." If you don't use a pen name, then you will be the author of articles in a variety of niches. And when a person sees this, they generally assume the "jack-of-all-trades, master of none" assumption about you.

And this assumption will negatively influence their perception of you, causing them to lower the value they place on your article (and thus reduce the chance of them clicking on your resource box link).

But the opposite is also true. By using one pen name per niche, you will more likely be seen as an expert in the niche. This will ultimately increase your click thru rate.

Not to mention that you can create a persona that better suits your reader. Let's say that your name is "Filmore Hagenbugger" and you want to promote a hot new online dating affiliate. You may want to use the pen name "Traci Summers" to better connect with your readers (in their minds anyway). And if you can better connect, all of your numbers will be higher (page views, CTRs, sales conversions, etc).

NOTE: My apologies to all the "Filmore"s out there.

2. Easier tracking. If you are a bum marketer, than chances are you are using Ezinearticles.com. The fact that they allow you to create unlimited pen names, makes it so simple to keep track of your articles.

Each niche is different. Having a CTR of 20% may be horrible for one niche, but very high for another. As long as you stick to one niche per pen name, you will be able to very quickly analyze the success you are having with your article writing efforts for each individual niche.

3. Gives you protection. What would happen if you wrote and submitted 2000 articles under one name, and then some marketers found out. Very easily, they would know exactly which niches you are targetting.

Not only that, but they will also know which niches you are having success with by seeing which niches you kept writing about. They would be able to see which affiliate programs you are promoting, how you write your headlines, resource boxes, etc.

Basically, it leaves your business open for additional competition.

Now, let's say that you generously use pen names. A clever marketer could find out about one of your niches, but you would still have some protection for the rest of your identities.

Using pen names is a must when using bum marketing. Take advantage of this feature at EZA.

Best wishes,

JoeMack

Do You Know How To Check Your Clickbank Stats?

Generally, most affiliate programs (including Clickbank) have a tracking or analytics system set up. You can view how many times your affiliate link was clicked there.

If you are promoting an affiliate product in the Clickbank Marketplace, just log into your account. Click on the Reporting tab.
Then click on the Analytics tab.

Once here, go to the section titled "Affiliate Reporting." Set the "Report By" setting to Publishers. Set the date range to what you are interested in (the last week, the last 30 days, etc).

This will give you a list of Publishers (ie. the owners of the affiliate programs you are promoting) and a number of useful statistics like Clicks (Hops), Sales, etc.

You can easily see which affiliate programs are getting clicks and more importantly, which ones are getting sales.

And this is really key. You will find that some of the affiliate programs are duds (meaning that the sales conversion ratio is very low). I just had to stop promoting a program because it had 402 hops without a sale.

But that's fine. Now I know, and I can start sending the traffic generated by articles for it to a different affiliate program.

And you will also see your winners, and can start putting more energy into promoting them. I have one affiliate program that results in a sale for every 47 people I send to the salespage. I have just increased my efforts with it because I know that its profitable.

Hope that helps.

JoeMack

Major Mistake Bum Marketers Are Making

Because of my Bum Marketing product, I get lots of emails from people either asking me why their bum marketing efforts are not resulting in profits, or that bum marketing straight out doesn't work.

After getting some additional info from them, I soon see a glaring mistake that they are making. And its this one mistake that really nullifies the effect of any article they write and submit.

You see, bum marketing is not just about writing articles. When done correctly, one article can generate traffic for years. But when done incorrectly, you have have dozens and dozens of articles barely generating any traffic at all.

Successful bum marketers learn about this mistake and change how they write their articles. But most bum marketers give up before ever learning this mistake, and think that bum (and article) marketing just doesn't work.

So what's the mistake? Its not properly choosing the long term keyword phrase to write your articles on.

You can't just pick an affiliate product to promote and start pumping out articles in that niche. If you do, and most people do, you will probably not see the traffic you want because the long tail keyword phrase that you are writing about either:

a. does not have enough daily searches
b. has too many competing websites

Here's the problem with not enough daily searches:

If there is not enough daily searches, the number of people finally getting to that affiliate salespage will be nil.

Let's say that you are targetting a keyword phrase that gets ten searches a day. You write and submit a well written articles around it.

Now, tomorrow, ten people will search for that keyword phrase. And let's say that there was little competition, and you landed on the first page of Google.

Will all ten people who search for that keyword click on the link that goes to your article? Probably not. I generally estimate 50% of searchers will click on the link to the article.

Ok, now there is five people a day reading the article. But will all five click on the link in your resource box? Again, no. The CTR for my articles is generally between 20-50%. Let's be generous and say that 50% of readers click on the resource box link.

Now you are down to just 2-3 visitors per day. If you do a simple redirect to the affiliate salespage, it will take quite a while to get a sale (using a 1-2% sales conversion rate, although you may get a sale right away - I'm just going by averages).

If you don't redirect to the salespage and instead have a landing page, you further filter out the amount of people getting to the affiliate salespage (and therefore significantly reducing the amount of sales you will see).

For my bum marketing efforts, I try to target long tail keyword phrases that get at least 30 searches a day on Google (although I try my hardest to find daily searches of excess of 100 per day).

And here's the problem with too much competition:

The main goal with bum marketing is to get your articles listed as high as possible in the search engine results. The top of the first page of Google is ideal.

Now, if you are competing against 100 pages, getting on the first page of Google is simple. But if the long tail keyword phrase you have chosen as 1,246,863 competing pages, getting to that first page will be much more difficult (and virtually impossible for the newbie bum marketer).

Proper keyword research will greatly increase the probability of having a successful article. But this skill takes a little practice.

I see many bum marketers gets so excited about writing and submitting articles, that they skip proper keyword selection, or they at least don't do it effectively.

One article that has lots of searches and little competition will far outperform 20-30 articles written around long tail keywords that have very few daily searches or tons of competing websites.

Its because of this fact that I am actually spending less them writing articles, and more time finding outstanding keyword phrases (actually, I enjoy keyword research so it works well for me).

So if you are not seeing the results you would like from your bum marketing efforts, I would suggest analyzing your process for long tail keyword phrase selection.

Hope this helps some fellow Bum Marketers.

Best wishes,

JoeMack

You Can Make More Than $200 Per Month With Bum Marketing

Here's what I mean:

I know of one affiliate program that pays a one time payment of $200 plus 10% of revenue created PER month (not on Clickbank, because they max out their commissions at $100) .

Now let's assume that their conversion rate is 1%. So for every hundred people you send to the affiliate salespage, you'll average one sale ($200 plus the additional monthly payout).

If you could manage to send it just 3-4 visitors a day, you should average one sale per month (ie. $200).

Now let's assume that you could generate 30 visitors in a month's time from one article written and submitted (which is low according to my personal experience - I sometimes get 5-10 times that amount).

If you wrote ten articles that month (which is just one article every three days), you should be able to generate around 300 visitors to the affiliate salespage.

And with a 1% conversion rate, you should make about 3 sales, resulting in $600 in commissions (plus the extra that you make each month the person is subscribed).

And this is from a "plan" in which you write just one article every three days.

What if you wrote an article a day? Or 3 articles a day?

Its a numbers game, but you get better at the game as you progress. Most people fail at bum marketing because they simply give up too early, not really because of a flaw in the strategy.

And look at it as a short term plan. Can you struggle through it for just a month? You can then use the profits to make things easier (outsourcing, hosting, autoresponders).

Best wishes,

JoeMack

How Many Articles Is Enough?

Today, a person on a forum I frequent asked the following question:

How many articles do you need to write for each niche/affiliate product?

A great question. Here's my response:

There are so many different factors involved, that picking an exact number of articles is nearly impossible.

What is the purpose of the articles? Are you simply trying to sell an affiliate product? Or, are you sending traffic to a landing page? Is it a forum you started that you want to get off the ground?

For me, when I am in the early stages of marketing a particular affiliate product, I try to get an estimate of the conversion rate of the affiliate salespage. I am trying to get between 200-300 visitors there, and see how many of them convert to sales.

If I am doing a simple top level domain name redirect, then the number of visitors will equal the number of URL clicks from my Ezinearticles.com account.

Now, different long tail keywords have different amounts of search demand. I may be able to find 10 keywords that each get approximately 100 daily searches on Google (so the group demand will be 1000 searches). But in a different niche/affiliate product, I may be able to find 5 keywords that get about 200 daily searches each (again, for a total seach demand of 1000 a day).

After I get 200-300 visitors to an affiliate salespage, I can get a fairly good estimate of whether the conversion rate is high enough for me to continue sending traffic to it. Once I find a winner, I try to write and submit at least 1-2 articles per week for it (if not more).

JoeMack

Free Keyword Research Tool for Bum Marketing

Two to three times a week I read about someone trying to implement a bum marketing/article marketing business model, but not knowing how to determine the demand of a particular long tail keywords.

And if you write articles, you know how important selecting the right keyword phrase can be.If you have the funds, I would highly recommend Wordtracker.com. A fellow Warrior gave me a show on how quickly Wordtracker can come up with profitable keyword phrases. It was absolutely amazing how much time and effort Wordtracker saves in terms of proper keyword selecting. They do have a free 7 day trial that you can try out. Click Here to learn more...

But if you are like most bum marketers, you just don't have the funds to get it (not yet anyway). So here's a free keyword research that I recommend to my buyers (and it uses Wordtracker to generate its numbers):
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

Now, if you have never used a keyword research tool, you'll be amazed at how much it will help you. For instance, let's say that you want to promote an affiliate product in the weight loss niche. You go to the keyword tool and search for the demand (number of daily searches) of the term: "weight loss."

Not only will you get the result for "weight loss", but you will also get the top searches that have the words "weight" and "loss" in the phrase.

So in this case above, you discover that "weight loss" gets 5,353 daily searches on Google.

But you also discover the daily amount of searches for:

-quick weight loss: 1,212
-weight loss tips: 1,106
-weight loss pills: 776
-weight loss cream: 703

You get the picture. It will generate terms that you would NEVER have thought of researching.

Try it out for yourself and see.

Can Bum Marketing Set You Free?

Hello All,

Recently, a fellow marketer posted the following question on a popular Internet Marketing forum: Can Bum Marketing Set You Free?

Here was my response:

Can Bum Marketing set a person free? Yes, I think it can. I think that the people who succeed in bum marketing see it for what it really is, mainly a short term, temporary marketing strategy used to generate funds to permanently establish an online income business.

Many people never make a single penny online because they don't know how to set everything up correctly (getting a domain name, hosting, designing a decent looking website, setting up payment buttons, getting a system in place for automatic product delivery, etc). Its daunting to most.

Bum marketing works because of its simplicity. You don't have to worry about developing a product, writing persuasive sales copy, getting graphics made, or all the other things that are involved in most internet businesses.

The bulk of what bum marketers have to do is write and submit articles. Sure, lots of the individual steps can be improved on (writing a better headline, choosing profitable keywords, etc), but in theory, a bum marketer can be making money as soon as their article gets approved (which is about 48 hours for me).

So for the individual who has struggled for years to make money online, bum marketing can indeed set them free....if....and its a big if.....if they can reinvest their profits back into their business. The smart marketers will use bum marketing as a springboard to more permanent and diversified income generation.