In 2007 a new term became very popular among internet marketers: Bum Marketing. It's a cute way of describing an affiliate marketing approach that incurs no expenses for web hosting or domain registration. Free community websites are utilized instead, ones where free web pages are being handed out to all comers. Basically you are building a page that is promoting an affiliate program, and trying to get your visitors to click through to the sales page. There has been a lot of commotion about this in the forums as of late.

Despite all the hype, most bum marketers fail ? even the most well-intentioned of them. The primary reason for this is that they go into it with a misconception of what it's all about. They soon find out that easy money does not flow quite as freely as they were initially led to believe. It turns out that putting up pages and attracting quality traffic that clicks on your links are two entirely different things.

The traffic from this type of marketing all comes from search engines. So the web pages are hosted on search-engine friendly sites. A bum marketer targets long-tail keyword search phrases that are related to the product being promoted, and writes an article ultimately leading to a recommendation of that product. Their affiliate link is conveniently provided. Sounds simple enough, so what can go wrong?

Several things, actually. You must be able to write well and your asking the reader to visit the link must seem compelling. The search phrase you are targeting needs to be relatively uncompetitive in order for your page to get decent rankings. The site you choose to host your web page must be one that naturally achieves decent rankings for many of it's individual pages. Even with all that, you still need to build incoming links to your web page in order to achieve and keep your page's search engine rankings. And of course, the sales page you are promoting must convert well.

A good choice for web page hosting is Hubpages.com. They are very search engine friendly, and it is easy to build clean-looking pages there. You want to find only high-converting sales pages to promote, and you need to discover long-tail search phrases which do not have strong competition at the top of the search results to target. Keyword Discovery has a free online tool that is currently the best available for finding search terms to target.

When your page is published you need to establish some incoming links to it. There are two very effective ways of doing this, and you should do both of them for all of your pages. The first way is to write another article with a link to your web page in the author's bio box and submit it to the top article directories on the web. The second way is to submit your links to 30 or so of the top social book-marking sites. It's best to do this over time, for example adding four or five book-marking links every few days over the course of four to six weeks.

If you do everything right you will have a page that gets some (but not a lot) of traffic, and earns a commission every once in a while. For this type of affiliate marketing to make a noticeable difference in your finances, you need to build a heck of a lot of pages over the course of several months or longer. Be consistent in your efforts. That's when you will start to see the payoff.