A bum marketer will find that he or she has competition these days. It is likely that somebody has already posted an article, free web page, or US Free Ads classified ad promoting the same affiliate link sales page that you want to promote. You know what? That’s not a problem. Because it’s also extremely likely that they didn’t do a good job of getting their page ranked well for the best relevant search terms.

As a matter of fact, your competition can actually make it easy on you by making a good target of themselves. Taking it a step further, this is even a good way to do research to find good web pages to build! Let me explain this using ezinearticles as an example.

What you would do is browse ezinearticles.com looking for articles that promote affiliate products in their signature. When you find one, do a Google search for the relative search term and see if the article ranks on the first couple of pages of results. Disregard any that don’t. When you find one, check the keyword search volume using one of the free keyword research tools (such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery). Make sure there is at least some traffic that is worth your while.

When you find a good target, just write a new article about the same subject and promoting the same affiliate sales page. You can even just rewrite the article you found in your own words. However, title the article after the exact search term you are targeting! Your competitor probably didn’t do that (they probably have an extra word in there or two to make the title flow better). Then get your article published on ezinearticles as well.

Now your article targets the search phrase better and all you have to do is get more links to it than your competitor got to his. A good place to start is by adding the link in some of your other ezinearticles author bios. Then hit all your social bookmarking sites of course. Break out your best link-building tricks that separate the successful bum marketers from the unsuccessful ones. (If you don’t have any, you need to read this blog more!)

In a few weeks your new article will probably be ranked higher than the competitor you chose as a target. So make sure their ranking is decent in the first place before starting, knowing that beating them out will result in a worthwhile final result. Also, note that ezinearticles.com does not allow direct affiliate links so you need to use an in-between landing page or a delayed domain redirect - but you knew that, right?

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