The term Bum Marketing derives it’s name from the fact that this affiliate marketing tactic avoids any kind of expenses. The most notable of the expenses which are avoided are domain registration and web hosting. Large community websites offering free pages are the venue of choice.

Not all free web page sites are suitable. The bum marketer needs one that will naturally aide in capturing good rankings for targeted search terms. Here are a few of the more popular free page hosting services and what I think about them.

Squidoo. All the buzz in 2007 was about this site and creating lenses to promote affiliate products. For a while it was easy to get these pages ranked in the search engines. That trend seems to have faded. I think this fad is dying and the smart marketers have moved on.

ezinearticles. Still the best article directory by miles, and it still carries a lot of weight with Google. You can get an article ranked pretty high for niche terms by naming the article after the term and then throw some links at it. However, that ranking will start dropping back real soon and in a few months will be buried. The only way to keep it ranked well is to get the page views up so it makes the “most viewed” list for it’s category.

Wordpress.com. One of the original venues for Bum Marketing, but now it’s dead as a doornail. You can’t get these pages ranked as well as your other choices so why fight it?

Hubpages. This is where most of the smart marketers who used to use Squidoo have now moved to. Nice clean pages and the search engines love them at this time. Highly recommended.

wikiHow. The only marketers really using this site are the lucky ones who have purchased my Wiki-Manager system. And they are cleaning up (the ones who are actually following the system). Highly recommended, but not for everybody. It’s kind of a grey hat thing.

That’s about it. We’ll see what hits the scene in 08.