The Bum Marketing method refers to affiliate marketing on the internet without having your own web hosting account. That’s what it boils down to. You are using free web content publishing sites that allow you to publish whatever you want to write on your own web pages that they give you for free. All you have to do is sign up for an account and start making pages. These pages will be promotions for affiliate products. When somebody clicks your link on your web page through to a sales page and then purchases the product, you earn a commission.

The term Bum Marketing was popularized by a guy named Travis Sago in an article that he published a couple of years ago. At that time he recognized that there were three free web content hosting services which seemed to get high search engine rankings for niche search terms. The sites he mentioned in the original article were: U.S. Free Ads, Squidoo, and Ezinearticles. Those are three very different types of websites. you got a free classified ad site, a free article directory, and a free blog creation site.

Well it’s been a few years, but for the most part everything he wrote about is still pretty much right on. One major change is that Hub Pages has become an excellent free blog hosting site for promoting affiliate programs, and I would choose that over the those other three. Those of you who own my Wiki-Manager system have an even better option. But all in all, the method still works. Had you started building free web pages back then you’d have a considerable empire by now.

One thing that’s changed is that you no longer just need to rely on search engine traffic to be successful. With the advent of Social Bookmarking and community sites such as Yahoo Answers, it is possible to drive traffic to your web pages from other sources. And those types of links will in turn help your search engine rankings as well.

The bottom line is that you need to keep building. Even obscure web pages that get a just little traffic can make you a nice living if you have enough of them.

Technorati Tags: Bum Marketing, Internet marketing, Affiliate marketing