BUM MARKETING

You do not have to break the bank to have an effective marketing campaign. If you decide to promote your own company,here are ten FREE do-it-yourself marketing tactics that will help your business gain exposure.

1. Social Network - Are you on Facebook? If not, you need to sign up. Facebook is one of the fatest growing online Social Networking websites. It’s no longer just for “college kids”. A lot of companies are promoting their products and services on Facebook. You’d be surprised at how many different free marketing opportunities are available on Facebook. We suggest you set up a “Group” related to your business and you can start sending out invites to people to join your group. Once someone is in your group, you can easily send them emails, promotions, events, etc.

2. Blog About Your Business - Don’t have a blog? Get one! You can get a free blog at sites like WordPress.com and Blogger.com. Or for less than $5 you can get your own web hosting plan and  you can host your own blog.  Blogging is great because you can update customers with information about your company or products on a weekly, daily or even hourly basis. Many companies are making great use of blogs. Amazon uses a variety of blogs to cross market products. The CEO of Zappos keeps investors and customers up to date via his blog. Even Fortune 500 companies understand the value of engaging customers through blogs.

3. Target Old Customers - If they bought from you before, mostly likely they will buy from you again.  Give them a call, tell them you value them, ask what it will take to get them back. You might be surprised at how simple or low-cost it is. If they say no thanks, consider it a learning opportunity and wish them the best. Then call them back in a year and ask again.

4. Internal Promo - Promote your business or new product by putting your marketing message on your fax sheets, your invoices, your on-hold music, your store signage, etc. Every contact you have is a potential customer. Let them know what you have to offer. I even suggest putting business cards in with bills when you pay them—you never know who’s opening your bill who might need you.

5. Talk to Your Customers - Ask for referrals and testimonials. If a customer praises your product or service, ask them to refer you to their friends and associates. Ask them to write a testimonial and post it on your website, blog or brochures.

6. Get Free Publicity - Write press releases, and submit them to the local media and to online press sites. However, before writing a press release you should do some reseach. Press releases should be “newsworthy” and properly written. Do a Google search for similiar press releases related to your business or product.

7. Educate Your Customer - Tip sheets, fact sheets, helpful hints, etc., can do wonders for your business. We typically forget that not everyone knows what we know. Disregard conventional “wisdom” when it comes to marketing. Forget “K.I.S.S.” (Keep It Simple Stupid), ignore “less is more”, and throw out “short and sweet”. With sales and marketing, the more you tell, the more you sell.

8. Trade Links - If you have a website, you should contact other website owners and exchange links. It’s amazing how much traffic you can drive to your website from link exchanges. If you don’t have a website, offer incentives to your current customers if they refer people to your business.

9. Create Joint Ventures - Team up with other businesses that complement yours. For example, if you’re a real estate agent, team up with a cleaning service, an interior decorator, and a personal chef to offer a nice packaged deal to a new home buyer.

10. Believe in Your Business. Your own passion about what you are doing is infectious. If you believe that you are providing a product or service that people need, then people will listen to you.

Travis from BummarketingMethod.com has a good video explaining  how BUM Marketing works:

So you completed Step #1 of BUM Article Marketing and you found your Niche . Your next step is to find an affiliate program that offers products within that niche, and which pays a decent commission. But this is where most BUM Marketers get stuck.

From my conversations with a lot of new BUM Marketers, it appears that most of them feel too overwhelmed by the amount of affiliate prorgams. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of experienced marketers’ and all their websites and emails about how they can make you rich.

Well, I am here to tell you that you should stay focused on a single plan and stick with it! (Atleast until you get your feet wet) While this sounds basic, the truth is, many get sucked into different affiliate programs and end up distracted!

I tell all new marketers to start with ClickBank.  Signing up as a ClickBank affiliate is free.

Once you’ve signed up as an affiliate, you can choose products to promote in the Marketplace section of the website. You are automatically credited with a percentage of any sales you make. The system keeps track of your sales by creating a link which contains your affiliate ID and the name of the product. In ClickBank’s terminology, this is known as a ‘hoplink’, and it looks like this:

http://yourname.productname.hop.clickbank.net

With over 35,000 products to choose from on ClickBank, it’s important to pick profitable ones to promote. Every promotion you do has a cost - if not in money, then in time. You obviously want to avoid promoting products that people don’t buy (ask yourself..would I buy this product?). 

Overall, ClickBank makes it easy to find the best products to promote.  Make a list of about 3-5 of the best products in your chosen niche, and you are ready to start promoting! It’s as simple as that.

The whole point of BUM Article Marketing is not to get your articles clicked on from people searching the article directories. BUM Marketing is really about getting as many articles of decent quality ranking highly in the search engines in order to get traffic to your affiliate links, sales pages, AdSense pages, opt-in pages and so on. The main goal is to get your articles into the top 10 Google results – meaning on Google’s first page. The more people that read your articles, the more likely they will click on your affiliate links contained within your article and resource box.

A key to being successful, is looking at the priorities of a successful BUM Article Marketing campaign:

1. Quality of content - if your content sucks, people won’t read your articles. No readers = no sales.
2. Increase the traffic to your affiliate links, sales pages, or AdSense pages - focus on ways to bring traffic to your product sales page.
3. Persistance and trial and error - don’t get discouraged if you don’t make money at first. Learn from your mistakes.

The first step in any BUM Article MARKETING campaign is finding a Niche. But in order to make money, you will then have to find a good affliate program within that niche to generate revenue. It is important that you know where to find affiliates and that you choose the best affiliates for you and your niche site.

When you pick an affiliate, it is important that you determine which companies you will profit best from based on the frequency that the product is likely to sell.

There are several types of affiliates and some will offer you more money from a sale than others will. Before you get hazy-eyed by dollar signs, however, remember, it’s qaulity not the quantity of money that the affiliate program offers.

For instance, if you promote an unknown product from a company that gives you $75 per sale and you sell 2-3 products a year or you promote a well-known quality product that sells at 2-3 times a week at the rate of $10 per sale, then you will make much more money with the $10 per sale product.

Often times large well known companies will offer a very small profit per sale because they are established and they have high quality product that are more likely to sell. Small, unknown companies, on the other hand, need all of the promotion they can get so they offer a higher pay per sale. Also, because they are unknown, their products are likely to sell less frequently.

The most important rule when picking affiliates to promote on your site is to pick products that would be of interest to those who would likely visit your niche site. Otherwise you will be promoting a product to a group of people who do not even want nor need it.

As more and more people discover the power of BUM MARKETING every day, many fail to learn some simple techniques to optimize their writing and maximize the effectiveness of their BUM MARKETING campaigns. Listed below are five BUM MARKETING mistakes to avoid:

Mistake #1: Picking the Wrong Title The title of an article is arguably the most important factor in getting it read.  If the title is not eye-catching or interesting, you have most likely wasted your time in writing it, as no one will read it.

Mistake #2: Publishing Poor Content Your articles should not be an advertisement for your product or website. The primary goal is to publish articles with content that is helpful to the readers.  Don’t submit articles unless they are unique and well-written.

Mistake #3: Ineffective Use of Author Resource Box When you are writing the body of your article, you should always remember to provide a link to your website or product at the end the article (this area is referred to as the Author Resource Box).  On most article directories, this is the only area in your article where you are allowed to actually promote your website and product. So, why not use it well

Mistake #4: Spell Check & Grammar If you’re writing articles as part of a serious BUM MARKETING campaign, then you need to spell check the articles. No one will publish your content if it’s full of spelling and grammar errors and readers will look down upon them.

Mistake #5: Submitting to Hundreds of Different Article Sites Mass article submission is a method of the past and is not longer effective. The Search Engine algorithms are getting more and more complex by the day. Not only is it considered a light form of spam to the search engines, serious Ezine and Newsletter publishers frown upon it as well.

One of the most fundamental tenets when you learn how to make money online is learning how to drive traffic to your website. There are dozens of methods from PPC advertising to article marketing to link swapping. However, the most underrated and sometimes hugely popular way to do so is to go out into the trenches and create organic leads back to your content.

Using Blogs

The best and most common way that people do this (for those few that do it) is through blogs. Blogs will help you make extra money with your website almost every time, but you don’t need to create your own blogs to do this. You should regularly be commenting on other peoples’ blogs, providing valuable comments and insights in exchange for the automatic backlink to your website it builds. Additionally, another strategy that works well in this regard is to offer to write a free post for a blog related to your topic in exchange for a link at the end of the post. You can get a great deal of traffic this way, especially if the site gets a lot of visitors.

Using Forums

Forums are harder to use in this regard because you cannot put links in them most of the time. Most forums frown upon advertising of any kind and you’ll be booted pretty quickly if you try it. However, if you start an account, build friendships and then start mentioning your website, you can usually get away with it and make extra money in the process. For anyone starting to make money at home, this is a good way to meet new people and develop new lines of traffic.

Using Social Networks

Social networks are another valuable tool that can be used to draw traffic and all without getting any accounts banned in the process. You can usually start a profile for yourself and for your business and then use them in tandem to draw new traffic. Build friend lists, create blog posts and talk to users in forums and chat and then draw them back to your website to help you make extra money online.

All of these methods are built around social interaction and participation on the Internet. They require time on your part (or money to hire someone to do it), but they almost all provide additional traffic for your time if you invest wisely.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_Walston

James Walston is a stay-at-home dad and expert online marketer. “Learn How to Have Non Stop Payments Of $540 Coming To You MULTIPLE TIMES, Weekly And Possibly Even Daily! To Learn More, Take a Free Tour at http://www.Infinity800Income.com

Darren Rowse is a blogger best known for his work on ProBlogger.net and Digital Photography School.  To say that he’s successful would be an understatement - revenue from ads paid his mortgage - and today, Rowse shared some tips for making money with AdSense.

Darren recently did an interview for Google Adsense, giving some of his own tips for creating higher conversions with Google Adsense. Some pretty good info for new bloggers and I am definitely going to revisit the ad placement on some of my blogs.

Check out this video here:

Bumper stickers are a convenient way to promote your company. Most bumper stickers are a popular way to say what you need to. People like bumper stickers that are flashy and eye-catching. If the bumper sticker has a humorous saying, all the better. That in-your-face comedy makes those who are near it laugh out loud.

Due to its adhesiveness it can be put up almost anywhere, any surface, and any material whatsoever. This is what makes stickers a unique item as its convenient compared to other print materials. In all aspects of communication stickers registers to be the cheapest and convenient way to convey your thoughts. Stickers enjoy huge market for itself.

Businesses can use bumper stickers as a method of promotion for the company. It is a widespread advertising phenomenon. Even if your company’s bumper sticker does not have a witty slogan, you can still use bright colors that will grab attention, even if it is only for a few seconds. Political campaigns are one of the widest supporters of bumper sticker promotion.

There are a few important points which should be kept in mind prior to designing and purchasing bumper stickers:

• Catchy slogan (should describe and have the target message which you want to convey).
• Cool and Stylish artwork (resolutions needs to be high for excellent quality printing).
• Size is an important aspect which should be carefully observed to see what kind of impact it would register with the viewer.
• Color Schemes (should be catchy for the viewer).
• Color Variations (one should keep in mind that what will be the colors that will showcase the hardcopy).
• If it’s a photograph then it should be cropped for a better resolution.
• Materials for Stickers printing should be thoroughly inspected as to which will suit the best.
• Cost matters should be addressed properly.
• Artistic touch is important for it to look professionally well-developed.

Stickers are one of those items which can decorate your marketing strategy to grab the bull by its horns. Bumper stickers can leave an everlasting impact to your marketing campaign. It truely is advertising that STICKS!