The Freedom Net

Have you heard of ‘bum marketing’ yet? No, this is not where you hire a bunch of street people to hold up signs for advertising your site on the streetcorner … it’s a “new” twist on the article marketing method put out by Travis Slago. It’s a no-brainer really, and you should consider becoming a bum. So what’s the difference between article marketing and bum marketing? There are a few subtle nuances, so let’s take a quick look ..

In article marketing, the objective is to drive traffic and links to your specific website on a certain subject. By writing a dozen articles and distributing them to 50 or 100 article directories, they can provide excellent back-links to your site to boost your Google Page Rank, as well as provide traffic - especially if someone else picks up a copy for their newsletter or ezine. A few people considered using this to promote affiliate programs as well, but the basis was to generate the traffic from mass quantity, rather than the quality of the sites the articles were on.

In bum marketing, however, the objective is to drive affiliate sales, plain and simple. Most article directories won’t allow affiliate links, so you’ll have to drive the traffic to your own landing page and then take them on in to the sales page. Another BIG difference is that we’re not looking for a hudred article directories to submit to. We’re looking for the top 3 - 5 that will get your article indexed by Google and the other major search engines quickly. By targeting long-tail keywords with decent monthly traffic and little specific competition, your site can end up in the top positions of these search engines pretty easily. Then, the traffic comes from actual people doing very specific searches for your product or service, rather than dozens of article sites and ezines. Don’t get me wrong, it’s ok to get traffic from anywhere you want to. However, using this method, you can get your articles indexed anywhere from 24 hours to 2 weeks, depending on the site(s) you submit it to. Then, it’s just a matter of sitting back and waiting for the traffic and sales conversions.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still not going to be a “get rich quick” program. However, Travis says he averages (after it’s all said and done) about $20 per month per article. So, using 1/2 his average (since my “luck” is never as good as those online ‘guru’ folks), we can develop a simple formula that says if I want $1000 a month, I need 100 articles out there working for me. If I want $3000 a month, then I need 300 articles out there working for me. Will it take time? Yes, it will. However, consider this: by targeting the long-tail keywords within any niche, you will actually have less competition for those terms. Your article could potentially stay at the top of the search engine listings for a long time. So, once you get this system in place at the level you want, it’s only a matter of maintenance.

Just think of it like a sales organization. The regional leader can only be successful if he has hundreds of salesmen out there working for him. In fact, typically he’ll get an override on their sales of a certain percentage. Each salesman working under him may only generate $10 a month income for the regional director. However, by leveraging the power of duplication (sound like an MLM pitch, don’t I … LOL) he can develop a long-term residual income that is semi-stable. You’re always going to have turn-over, but once you get a base of performers established, it’s all maintenance from there on out.

Article marketing is exactly the same way. Bum marketing just takes it to the next level, and makes it even easier, if that’s possible. The biggest deterrent to success with this method will be the same thing it always is: procrastination and paralysis of analysis. Think long, think wrong. Put up or go home.

Publishing was the first form of mass communication, but required a lot of time to “spread the word”.
Radio, while it didn’t replace books, provided a way to communicate with a wider audience instantly over the airwaves.
Television became one of the fastest growing mediums next, followed by the Internet.

However, the Internet has developed a few trends in and of itself.
At first, everything online was free, and people were happy just to find something interesting.
Then, people started to look for specific things, and other people started to sell them.
E-books came on the scene, and instant downloads beat waiting on something in the mail.
Web 2.0 arrived, and everyone wanted to know what everyone else was doing online … and social networking Internet-style was born. This phenomenon, of course, has happened in real life. But, as with anything else, the Internet seems to have a way of taking it to the next level … reaching a potential audience larger than any other.

Take YouTube for example.It’s the #4 visited website in all of cyberspace. What’s it about? Videos … that’s it. User submitted, user rated. It’s all about you, and what you are watching.

Now, as with any other Internet trend (banners, ebooks, mp3s, etc.) people have decided that maybe it would be nice to get paid for their videos. Not surprisingly, a number of sites have sprung up that are willing to do just that.

Revver.com shares a 50/50 split with their video producers, minimum $20 payout. Seems okay, but they don’t get as much traffic as the next program … so it “pays” to promote your video. Oh yeah, it also “pays” to promote other people’s videos too … 20% revenue share to people who simply share the video on their blog or site. Revenue is based on view and click-throughs, depending on the ad type. So, there’s no real “average” or way to be certain what you will get. Top producer stats aren’t revealed, but the top video took in around $50,000 (it was the infamous mentos in a coke bottle video) … and the site paid out $1 million in total revenue sharing in the last 12 months. They did say around 25,000 users had earned $1000 or so.

Metacafe.com on the other hand, has a much more interesting service. You only get paid for views on their site, but they get over 1 million hits a day. It’s set up much like YouTube, with users rating videos. You qualify for payout once you hit 20,000 views. It’s not based on click-throughs, just views of the video. The payout is $5 for every 1,000 page views, so once you hit 20,000, you’ve earned $100. At 40,000 you’ve earned $200. You don’t get paid for sharing, but the potential is there to earn big bucks because of the traffic. Top producer has earned over $60,000 in the last year with around 80 videos. Read that again … that’s impressive, isn’t it? And no, their not sex videos either. This guy is actually a tech geek. He has quite a few “how to” videos in the collection. One of the others in the top ten had a video earn him $6,000 in the last month. I saw it … unbelievably simple.

Anyway, I’m sharing this because I really believe that video is the next BIG thing online. I mean, I know it’s big now … but I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. Nada, zero, zilch. I have started noticing that Pay Per Post offers a substantial payment for videos. The blog doesn’t have to have a high PR, just be willing to post the video to YouTube and on the blog. Payment for videos on PayPerPost ranges from $35 to as high as $100. It’s unbelievable what they will pay for a 1 minute video clip. Stay tuned, because the next year or so is going to be something else …

OK, I don’t usually jump on the bandwagon of new start-up programs. In fact, I’m not so hot on programs, even if they’ve been around a while. However, I recently came across this in the forums of another site where I do some freelance writing, and thought it looked fairly interesting.

After reviewing the site and the way it is setup, I think it has a lot of potential. Basically it’s a product review site, done in Web 2.0 style. Take ePinions, and then add it some vendor advertising and revenue sharing with the peer-rated and screened reviews. That’s the basics behind Shared Reviews.

Now they haven’t announced what their payout structure will be yet as far as when the site actually goes live. However, they are in the middle of ramping up during beta and aquiring a few thousand reviews so they will have some content when they go live. They are paying premium dollar for this content … $10 for every 5 reviews approved. This is a good price, and I’m sure this won’t be the same scale as the payout after launch, but we shall see. So, my point is, you should sign up now, while in beta, to get the up-front big money for these reviews! In addition, by getting your reviews in now, you will have a good base of reviews to earn revenue sharing off of when the site does it’s official launch!

;-)

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net is celebrating the blog’s 3rd birthday with us this week. In order to commemorate the event, ProBlogger is holding a week-long extravaganza of contests and giving away over $50,000 in cash and prizes.

The birthday bash itself is an interesting study in marketing. Each prize is donated by a company or individual. Some companies I’ve never heard of. I assume they are trying to get their name out there. Some companies appear to be trying to promote their site to gain new participants. Other sponsors are simply individual bloggers who I can only assume are looking for a backlink from Problogger.net (with a Google PR6) and a potential boost in readership. It’s actually quite intriguing.

So if you want to check out blog marketing in action, head over to Problogger.net for their Birthday Bash - you never know, you just might win something!

Well, it used to be said that MSN’s LiveSearch was the easiest search engine to get a high placement for your keywords. That simply may not be true anymore. It appears that LiveSearch has recently updated their algorithm and the results are pretty impressive.

The entire goal, obviously, is to produce more relevant results than Google. Did they succeed? I think they did. At least in the half a dozen search terms I queried, their first page of results was much more focused than the first page of Google’s results.

Based on past product launches, I think Google should start getting concerned. Microsoft has never come out with a stellar product from day one. However, they have a very good history of upgrading their products. Once upgraded, they seem to go from underdog to wiping out the competition in a minimal amount of time. Will it happen in the search engine arena? Only time will tell, but I wouldn’t count this dog out of the hunt just yet …

I don’t know if you’ve been keeping track or not, I know that I wasn’t.  A while back I noted here on my blog that I dropped a ton of e-mail lists that I was subscribed to, mainly to reduce the amount of garbage in my Inbox.  Well, slowly but surely that pile has reincarnated itself.  But this isn’t about that.

I was surfing through my available PayPerPost opportunities this evening, when I ran across this opportunity listing:

Reality TV - The Next Internet Millionaire is the world’s first competitive Internet reality show

Well, I just had to check this out, even though the opp already had it’s max number of participants.  So I went on over to www.nextinternetmillionaire.com to see what the buzz was all about.  Turns out that Joel Comm has his latest joint venture going on in a reality TV style online “show” to select … you guessed it, his next JV partner!!!

I have to admit, being selected to be a JV partner with Joel Comm would really be cool, but here’s the big deal about the site.  Each episode seems to have another Internet marketing expert come on and give some info about marketing and building an online business.  This is where it really gets useful for you and I, staying at home.  While we haven’t been selected to participate on the show, we can glean some knowledge from the guest experts about the IM game.  Tonight’s guest was none other than Brad Fallon.

OK, I’m hooked.  I’ll be watching the rest of these as they progress, and reviewing the previous episodes.  Now this is reality TV that I can get into!!!

So I’m doing some research the past couple of days about a marketing method called ‘bummarketing’ and I started reading about something called a ’squidoo lense’???

OK, so I do remember reading something about Squidoo being the brainchild of Seth Godin.  I’ve talked about Seth before on the blog, and I have a lot of respect for this marketing genius.  However, I’m not so sure I understand the Squidoo concept just yet.

I’m heading over there later this evening to start my own series of lenses.  I won’t be sharing the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything - at least not just yet.  First, I’m going to check it out.  Then, I’m going to do some tests with Squidoo and bummarketing.  Then, dear reader, as usual, I will come back here and report my findings to you!

Stay tuned for more on Seth Godin’s Squidoo and ‘bummarketing’…

Well, it’s been exactly 12 days since I fixed the problem with my robots.txt file.  After impatiently checking each and every day, today I have discovered that Google is once again indexing the main directory of my blog:  http://the-freedom-net.com/blog.

So why is this so important?  Because PayPerPost will not include a blog into the marketplace until it is being indexed by the search engines.  Now, I still don’t have any page rank yet, but that’s okay … I’ll get my foot back in the door first, and start my campaign soon to dominate the web … er, I mean, get some back links and boost my page rank .

Well, I finally figured it out!  I know why I have had issues getting this blog indexed by Google and other search engines.  I was wracking my brain today trying to figure it out … then I remembered!

A while back when I was setting up several blogs as sub-folders on this domain, I created a robots.txt file for the search engines so they wouldn’t index any sub-folders yet.  I wanted to make sure that people visiting the home page (still under construction, btw) wouldn’t be able to find the blog(s).  Unfortunately, once I got this blog ready to submit to PPP, I forgot to modify the robots.txt file!  I’ve been blocking the search engines from indexing the blog myself!  OK, now I feel stupid.

In the event you’ve never heard of the robots.txt file, you can find out all about it here:

http://www.robotstxt.org

OK, not really, but it sounded good,didn’t it?  I mean, isn’t that one of the places you would go if you were financially able to do so? Me too.

Well, I may not be able to go there yet, but I can sure practice my Hawaiian language skills.  I found a great new place that allows me to do research online, compile the results, and get paid for it!  It’s the new human powered search engine, Mahalo! (that is thank you in Hawaiian)

Even if you are not interested in being a part-time guide (it pays $10-$15 per search term accepted into their system), you should still check out the search engine.  In fact, I have a deal you just can’t beat with a stick.  Try the Mahalo Follow toolbar for Firefox for a few days, and see if you don’t notice a difference in the results you get.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.  (And I’m not just saying that because I’m doing work for them either)