How to Make Money with Zero Dollars
Last August, a gentleman named Aric emailed me with this question:
“Is it really possible to make money with no investment at all?”
Most of you reading this blog are probably familiar with how to make money with google adsense (contextual advertising) or adwords (marketing affiliate products through pay-per-click networks). These are tried and true methods of generating an income online but require some level of investment in order to pay for advertising, web hosting, domain names etc.
Anyway, at the time Aric asked me this question, I was doing pretty good with Contextual Marketing, i.e. Adsense, pay per lead and pay per action programs, where I used traditional SEO techniques to drive traffic to content sites filled with various offers. Anyway, I hadn’t really thought much about this at all…
…but when posed with the question I was inspired to start looking for ways to generate income “out of thin air”.
By the beginning of September (2006), I stumbled across a method on how just about anyone can start earning money online with no money or resources. Only an investment of time (or sweat equity) was required to pull it off.
It was nothing revolutionary or anything… but no one really talked about it at the time.
In any event, last spring (perhaps early summer) a free report on Article Marketing for Adsense sites written by a gentleman named Tim Gorman was circulating the internet. It contained a very specific strategy to drive traffic to Adsense sites by publishing articles to Ezinearticles.com and other top tier article directories.
Of course this type of article syndication had been done for quite some time, but Tim had come up with what he called an “article blitz” that drove a lot of traffic to his article sites.
Having read this report and implemented many of the strategies taught in
Tim’s report, it occurred to me that you could just as easily send traffic directly to affiliate products from the submitted articles.
So, I set out to test the method over a four month period (starting September of last year), and ended up generating about $100 per day by December.
For what it’s worth, I did this very part-time in addition to my contextual marketing initiatives and during the testing phase it took me about 1 – 2 hours to write and submit 3 – 5 articles (10 – 20 minutes per article + 5 minutes of formatting for submission).
Sometimes I completely re-wrote PLR (private label rights) articles but for the most part the articles were 100% original.
So what are the core steps to succeed in Direct to Affiliate Article Marketing?
Well, there are five steps:
1. Find a hot niche
2. Find a good product (if a Clickbank product, look for ones with decent sales copy).
3. Find appropriate keywords that people actually search for (long-tail keyword research).
4. Write compelling articles and submit them to directories
5. Take Massive Action and keep repeating steps 1 – 4.
That’s it!
By the way, last fall a gentleman by the name of Travis Sago released a free report called “
The Bum Marketing Method”, which details a very similar method. It is a free and highly recommended if you are interested in pursuing this method.
A word of caution: Article Marketing / Bum Marketing should not be considered a “long-term” strategy for generating money online. I do recommend that once you start seeing revenue that you start investing and developing your own “virtual real estate” by pointing older articles back to your “new” domains. This way the older articles can be recycled and be used for linking back to your sites (which means higher ranking in the search engines).
By the way, for those wondering about my bum marketing videos…
As some of you may know, I had released nine free videos detailing the steps required to succeed in article marketing. Unfortunately they are currently unavailable from this server. However, I’m re-editing and adding new content (as some things have changed since I first released them in February) and will be releasing the new and improved bum marketing videos on this blog over the next month or so.
[tags]bum marketing, article marketing, how to make money with zero dollars, how to make money with google adsense, google adsense[/tags]
Comments
Steven,
Your tips are very insightful and genuine. I’ve picked up many helpful resources from your posts.
Continued Success!
Thanks Jen.
I’m glad you’re finding the information helpful.
All the best,
Steven
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