Bum Marketing Method In Action

I’m taking a hiatus from posting about Adwords and Google Slaps for a bit. I am still very much involved with running Adwords campaigns for various offers and have even started doing a little SEM consulting. So Adwords PPC is still very much at the core of what I do online.

However, so as not to have all my eggs in the same proverbial basket, I also need to get back to what got me here in the first place, which is article marketing and organic traffic generation methods.

In addition to getting back into article marketing and SEO for my own sites, I have the opportunity to assist my brother with finding ways to supplement his own income.

Now, my brother is a rather private person and I’m sure he wouldn’t appreciate too much information about his life being published on a blog, but to sum things up, he’s a really bright guy, that by his own choice, decided a long time ago to live very simply and very cheaply.

He does have a “job”, but it’s working for some friends under very low pressure conditions and isn’t your typical 40+ hours per week, cubicle dwelling “career” like I used to endure. Suffice it to say, between the income from this gig and his savings, he’s able to eek out a very modest living.

My brother lives in an undisclosed city in the American Midwest that was prominently featured in a great movie by the Coen Brothers a few years back, and gets bitterly cold during the winter months.

OK, I gave that part away.

My brother, who’ll I’ll call “Rob” (which is actually his real name coincidentally), is coming back this way for a brief visit and though he hasn’t explicitly asked for any help with finding alternate streams of income, my father and I have taken it upon ourselves to gently nudge Rob into getting online and trying his hand at IM.

I just purchased a nice little Dell laptop on eBay for him and will get it set up prior to his arrival. The challenge will be to get him warmed up to the idea of owning a laptop. The really big hurdle will be to get him to spring for the monthly cable broadband service, which will be a considerable financial burden to him for sure.

The logistics of all that still need to be worked out and may involve some help initially from the rest of the family, but I see the long term strategy as being for Rob to cover the $49.94 monthly ISP fee from what he’ll eventually be able to earn online.

So what do you think? How hard is it to earn $50 per month?

Well, I know from reading posts on some of the forums that it’s actually harder than you might expect, but I think with some guidance, that I can get Rob to that point in about 3 months providing he’s willing to give this whole online business thing a shot in the first place.

Obviously, the first business model that immediately comes to mind for Rob to apply is Travis Sago’s “Bum Marketing Method“. Now, personally, I’m not real fond of that name. I do realize the point of the name and feel it sussinctly describes the method, but nevertheless, I find the word “bum” rather insulting. I won’t get into a debate about it, since the term has been around for a while, and anyone involved for any length of time in IM knows what the term applies to.

On second thought, I think the term “Bum Marketing Method” is often used incorrectly to apply to article marketing in general and that’s not what Travis originally intended I believe. Put very strictly, Bum Marketing is using content creation to drive free traffic to offers that you receive a commission for and that doesn’t involve any Web hosting or even ISP fees.

So one implementation of Bum Marketing would be to submit articles to free article directories such as EzineArticles.com and then in the author’s resource box have link(s) to a free blog hosted on either Blogger.com or WordPress.com. The free blog in turn, would have original content along with a combination of affiliate offers and contextual advertising such as Google Adsense.

So our frugal IMer could go to the public library and use the free Internet-connected computers there to submit articles and manage his/her blog account(s).

Now in Rob’s case, we’re hoping that we can save him the incovenience of trekking to the library in waist-high snow drifts and minus 30F temperatures and manage all these accounts from the warmth and comfort of home. He could even hold off on getting Web hosting and just use a free Blogger account.

So whether Rob knows it or not, the grand IM marketing experiment to generate $50 per month in an undisclosed location in the American Heartland has already begun.