the richest man in atherstone

Towards the end of last year, I happened upon a webpage describing an income-generation technique called The Bum Marketing Method - so-called because, in theory, a 'bum' could be taken off the streets, taught the method and start earning cash.

Basically, the strategy involves writing articles that contain your own unique links to affiliate products/services and posting them on article websites. When people search the web, they find your article, hopefully click on your link and make a purchase from which you earn a cut of the profits.

I found the method quite interesting and was curious as to whether it would work or not, so I decided to give it a try. What follows is my review of the Bum Marketing Method.

What I did...
The first thing I did was sign up for a free ClickBank Affiliate Account. ClickBank is a marketplace for affiliates and publishers of digital information products (software and e-books) to get together. Affiliates can search through loads of products to find something that they want to market. When the affiliate has found a product, they can create a unique link that is used by ClickBank to ensure that the affiliate gets their share of the profits when something has sold.

I found an e-book about Ragdoll Cats and wrote a couple of articles about them using information freely available on the web. I used the Overture Keyword Tool tool to find commonly searched phrases in this niche and scattered them around the articles.

I also wrote articles for a PlayStation 2 Repair e-book, PDF Writer software (2 products in 1 article) and a flower pressing e-book using the same method. The latter, I also knocked up a quick website for.

These are the articles:

• Ragdoll Cats 1
• Ragdoll Cats 2
• PS2 Repair
• Flower Pressing
• PDF Writing

And all articles were submitted to the following article websites that were either recommended in the strategy or found via Google:

• Article Dashboard
• Go Articles
• SearchWarp
• Amazines
• Article Alley
• Idea Marketers

I also created some Squidoo lenses about the particular subjects:

• PS2 Repair Lens
• Ragdoll Cat Lens
• PDF Software Lens
• Flower Pressing Lens

To speed up indexing by search engines, I also put links to them on this website (at the bottom of the right sidebar). Search Spiders come here every day, so they would discover my new pages by following the links.

Finally, I wrote a quick web script to log all the hits I got.

It took about 15 hours in all to get all this done.

The Results
A few months later and I have sold 2 copies of the flower pressing ebook and one copy of the ragdoll cats ebook, earning me around $46 (£23).

Altogether I have got 1350 hits through my affiliate links, so that's a sale every 450 hits - or to look at it another way, an average of 17p per hit. I put in around 15 hours work and got back around £1.50 an hour.

The lions share of the clicks came from SearchWarp and Squidoo and the product that achieved the most clicks was the PS2 repair Guide, despite not making a sale!

Unfortunately, I haven't got my hands on the cash yet because Clickbank won't release earnings for new accounts until at least 5 different purchases have been made. I am reliably informed by multiple sources, however, that Clickbank is a reputable company and does pay out without hassle once this requirement has been met.

Conclusions
Some might say that the Bum Marketing Method is not worth the effort as it only earned me £1.50 per hour - way below minimum wage. Based on this experiment, I'd have to agree however it's worth noting that I only marketed a small sample of 5 products. The method does recommend writing 90 articles (one per day for 3 months).

Looking at the results of the experiment, I certainly can't justify writing that many articles so I don't plan on using this method in the near future. I imagine that the more I did it, the more I would learn and subsequently the more I would earn, but at this point in my life I don't really have the time to do this. But I do think it may be a worthwhile activity at times when there is nothing more lucrative to do. It would only take the right article for the right product being in the right place and it could mean a nice little earner!

Despite the inadequate earnings, this experiment has taught me a lot. I can now quickly write articles on subjects I know very little about and understand a lot more about marketing on the Internet. I have also learned a great deal about Search Engine Optimisation and the use of keywords/key phrases. This knowledge is worth far more than any money I could have made.

UPDATE: 11/10/2007
Hooray! I finally made enough credit card sales to release my cash!

I've not done any more Bum Marketing since I wrote this article but it's been ticking along nicely on it's own. I should be getting a check for $80 sometime this month.

Here's a screenshot of my Clickbank account (it's not as fancy as those you see on other websites).

NOTE: Ignore the $2.95 sale - that wasn't from Bum Marketing