Article Marketing, Bum Marketing, Free Marketing

In the realm of internet marketing, there are two basic directions to go with your sales campaign. The first, pay-per-click, can be expensive, especially for neophyte e-marketers. This method requires a full understanding of how to locate key phrases and optimizing your landing page, an online sales letter, to ensure that the target audience is presented with the advertisements you bid on. Without this understanding, pay-per-click can cost a newbie thousands of dollars in unfruitful advertisement.

The second, article marketing or bum marketing, is the focus of this paper. Articles about the item you are selling are written and submitted to online ezine databases. Each article should have a link to your landing page, again a single page Web site about your product, where targeted customers will be likely to opt-in to your newsletters, emails or database in return for free information. Your landing page will pre-sell customers, so that when they click to the affiliate product site, they are interested in buying the product.

Article or bum marketing is free to the Internet entrepreneur--all it takes is some time spent researching and writing the articles, at least 30 articles for each product you are promoting, and a landing page. You don't have to learn XHTML or CSS or any other Web based technology. Squidoo.com has free accounts where you can build landing pages for your products. The articles you write will have a link to the Squidoo site, or other site if you have one, in the author's bio box so that visitors can learn more about the product and its benefits.

It is important to emphasize benefits of the product, rather than features. Very few customers purchase a product based on its features. The majority purchase products that can benefit them in some way or solve a problem. Tell your customer how your product will benefit them: your bad breath smells better and you don't antagonize your spouse; your dog will be obedient and stop eating your shoes; your own hair will grow in to cover your bald spot which will make you look ten years younger--whatever product you are selling, focus on the benefits using your product will provide to your buyer.

The link in your article bio box will take your prospect to your landing page where you can show them the benefits and guide them to the affiliate site where they purchase the product. Thirty or more articles, developed with proper search engine optimization (key word or phrase used once every 100 to 150 words, and in the title) will climb quickly in natural search engine results. This ensures more people find the link to your landing page, a portion of whom will follow to the marketer's page and become buying customers, instead of prospective customers.

Bum or article marketing is not an overnight riches method of Internet marketing, but the campaigns you set up now will make you money for a very long time--24 hours a day! It requires commitment, hard work, and consistent effort, but it will work. How do you think you will feel when you hold the first $1,000 check from your article marketing efforts in your hand? How will you feel when you are making that much every single day? It is absolutely possible. Thousands are already doing it.