The Death of Bum Marketing

[djbaxter]

The Death of Bum Marketing
By Rosalind Gardner
Monday, February 28, 2011

What is Bum Marketing?
Bum Marketing is a strategy used to generate affiliate commissions through distribution of articles written specifically to rank highly for low-competition keywords. The method was promoted as an easy way for beginners to make money online without having to invest much money, time or effort.

How does Bum Marketing work?

1. Do extensive keyword research to find low competition niche markets and products with moderate to high demand.
2. Find a product or service that can be promoted to that niche through an affiliate program.
3. Write scads of articles following a keyword density formula designed to get top search engine rankings quickly.
4. Submit those articles to popular article directories.

Why is Bum Marketing Dead?
Google?s latest algorithm change, Farmer, spells death for Bum Marketing sites in the same way as crappy, useless Adsense sites were targeted in past algorithm changes.

Read more...

 

[ArizonaJay]

By result, Chris is having to implement a number of changes to his article directory to ward off potential spammers, i.e. bum marketers. Some of those changes include:

* No more submissions through a WordPress plugin,
* raising the bar on articles written for keyword density,
* removing articles in ‘spammy’ categories such as reverse cell phone lookup and acai berry
* and requiring exclusivity.

Can anyone expand on what ezine means as exclusive?

 

[djbaxter]

Can anyone expand on what ezine means as exclusive?

I believe it means that the article is not also submitted or published elsewhere.

 

[Linda Buquet]

AJ read my post too:

http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5...es-combat-google-farmer-update.html#post84150

If I remember right in that article it explains exclusive as written originally by you but it CAN be posted elsewhere. DOUBLECHECK because I was skimming since I don't focus on article marketing.

 

[seoptimize]

Thanks for the article. I think that the change isn't going to "kill" bum marketing, I think it's most likely going to make EA (and other directories) really change the way they operate, as Chris said.
Article marketing, especially with longtail keywords, is still going to be effective, and as long as people want to take advantage of another site's PR/higher rankings compared to starting their own blog from scratch, the supply and demand will be there, despite the drop in visits for EA. If anything, EA will be used more for backlinks rather than direct traffic.