Bum Marketing seems to be almost everywhere you look on the internet at the moment, presented as the latest and greatest brand new marketing idea.
However, at first glance, to anyone that has been marketing online for any length of time, Bum Marketing appears to be little more than Article Marketing (a previously recognized and widely used internet marketing methodology) dressed up in a more modern, trendy guise.
Is that genuinely the case, or are there important differences between Bum Marketing and Article Marketing that internet marketers need to be aware of?
In my opinion, yes, there is one crucial difference that makes Bum Marketing a very different animal to its predecessor, which in fact takes Bum Marketing off in an entirely different direction to that of Article Marketing.
Article Marketing is a very simple, basic tactic of online marketing, and, as it has been around a long time, let us deal with it first.
To utilize Article Marketing, you simply write an article about your chosen or niche topic, and then submit it to the article directories (like this one) to generate visitors to your site.
It would also create backlinks to your site, although in the past, this was probably not seen as being as important as generating actual visitors.
However, to use Article Marketing effectively, it was critical that you did some keyword research first, and that your article, as submitted, used your keywords several times.
In this way, your article should allow you to catch people searching in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, using the exact keywords or keyword phrase that you included in your article.
To a certain degree, your article would be search engine optimized
Importantly, however, up until the last couple of years or so, writing articles that were optimized for search engines only to a degree like this was enough, and taking what might be termed a broadly targeted keyword approach was okay.
So, say my site had something, anything to do with dogs. My articles could have been about almost anything dog related – training, breeding, walking, grooming, dog supplies, anything, because all of these topics stood a reasonable chance of pushing people towards my website.
The problem with the original Article Marketing idea was that it was pretty unfocussed.
Fine, drive people to your site but what exactly, specifically, do you want them to do when they get there? That is probably a question a lot of old style article marketers might not have had an answer for.
Also, article marketing just became so popular that the market was swamped with people doing it, so that it became more and more difficult to choose good keywords for an article that would give you any chance of decent search engine rankings.
This brings us bang up to date and the recent arrival of Bum Marketing in the panoply of internet marketing systems available.
Bum Marketing is still based on the core practices of article marketing. That is, write an article, submit it, and have it published.
Thereafter, Bum Marketing becomes a very different animal to basic article marketing, in two key ways, that both point to one simple word:
1. Bum Marketing necessitates a very clearly defined focus on what you want your article to do. The idea is still that it sends a reader to your website, but when they get there, it is to a site that is super focused or targeted, generally on making an outright product sale. This is why Bum Marketing is so popular with affiliate marketers, who often try to send the reader directly to an affiliate site, although this is specifically banned by many article directories.
2. There is much more focus on the keywords to be used when Bum Marketing than there used to be in the old days, partially relating back to the first point of making an outright sale. Returning to our earlier dog example, for article marketing purposes, we might have used a keyword phase such as “dog training”. For Bum Marketing purposes, this is way too vague and untargeted. Here we might use “dog training supplies in Indianapolis”, on the basis that anyone who is searching this specifically is probably looking to by dog training supplies, and they are equally probably based in the Indianapolis area. Thus, by pointing them to a site that actually sells such supplies, we can utilize Bum Marketing tactics to seek out buyers rather than surfers, and lead them to where they can buy!
Effectively, therefore, the critical difference between old style Article Marketing and Bum Marketing can be summarized in one word – focus.
Also, especially for internet marketers who are new to the business, using Bum Marketing means that there is no need to create their own products, hence its current popularity.
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