Bum Marketing seems to be almost everywhere on the internet right now, billed as the latest and greatest new marketing idea.

However, at first glance, to anyone who has been marketing online for a period of time, Bum Marketing appears to be little more than Article Marketing (a previously recognized and widely used internet marketing methodology) dressed in a more modern look and feel. Fashion.

Is that really the case, or are there important differences between Bum Marketing and Article Marketing that internet marketers need to be aware of?

In my opinion, yes, there is a crucial difference that makes Bum Marketing a very different animal from its predecessor, which in fact takes Bum Marketing in a completely different direction than Article Marketing.

Article marketing is a very simple and basic tactic of online marketing and since it has been around for a long time, let’s talk about it first.

To use article marketing, simply write an article on your chosen topic or niche, and then submit it to article directories (like this one) to drive visitors to your site.

It would also create backlinks to your site, although in the past this was probably not considered as important as generating actual visitors.

However, to use article marketing effectively, it was critical that you do keyword research first and that your article, as submitted, used your keywords multiple times.

In this way, your article should allow you to catch people searching on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, using the exact keywords or keyword phrase that you included in your article.

To some extent, your article would be optimized for search engines.

However, it is important to note that until a couple of years ago or so, writing articles optimized for search engines only to a degree like this was enough, and taking what could be termed a broadly targeted keyword approach was fine.

So let’s say my site has something, something to do with dogs. My articles could have been on just about anything dog related – training, breeding, walking, grooming, dog supplies, anything – because all of these topics had a reasonable chance of nudging people to my website.

The problem with the original idea of ​​article marketing was that it was pretty out of focus.

Okay, direct people to your site, but what exactly do you want them to do when they get there? That’s probably a question that many old-fashioned article marketers might not have had an answer for.

Also, article marketing became so popular that the market was flooded with people doing it, making it increasingly difficult to pick good keywords for an article that would give it any chance of getting a decent ranking in the engines. search.

This brings us up to date and the recent arrival of Bum Marketing to the panoply of internet marketing systems available.

Bum Marketing still relies on core article marketing practices. That is, write an article, submit it and publish it.

From then on, Bum Marketing becomes a very different animal than commodity marketing, in two key ways, which point to a single word:

1. Bum Marketing needs a very clearly defined focus on what you want your article to do. The idea is still that you send a reader to your website, but when they get there, it is to a site that is super focused or directed, usually on making a direct sale of products. This is why Bum Marketing is so popular with affiliate marketers, who often attempt to send the reader directly to an affiliate site, although this is specifically prohibited by many article directories.

2. There is much more focus on the keywords to be used in Bum Marketing than there used to be in the old days, partially relating to the first point of making a direct sale. Going back to our previous dog example, for article marketing purposes we could have used a keyword phase like “dog training”. For the purposes of Bum Marketing, this is too vague and not targeted. We could use “Indianapolis dog training supplies” here, on the basis that anyone specifically looking for this is probably looking for dog training supplies, and they are equally likely located in the Indianapolis area. So by pointing them to a site that actually sells such supplies, we can use Bum Marketing tactics to find buyers instead of boaters, and guide them where they can buy!

Effectively, therefore, the critical difference between old-style article marketing and bum marketing can be summed up in one word: focus.

Also, especially for internet marketers who are new to the business, using Bum Marketing means there is no need to create your own products, hence its current popularity.

Bum Marketing is effectively the mark 2 version of Article Marketing and while they are new people looking to get into the internet marketing business, it is not likely to go away any time soon.