Bum Marketing Archives - The At Home Couple

Monday At The Office With Elijah

In the words of Freddie Taylor, Greetings Blog Family – If you recall a little while back SuiteJ did a video post about his home office, and certain things he has laying around to keep him inspired – so I decided to give you guys a little inside scoop of my world, and my office/studio where I do all of my online work. It’s important to have an office environment filled with tokens and mementos of inspiration – whether it be vinyl records or the latest Sound On Sound magazine. On that note, it’s also important to be comfortable in your office, especially if you’re spending 10-16 hours a day in it.

I shot this video first thing this morning when I woke up, and made sure everything was untouched so you get a good idea of exactly what my working environment is like!

Cheers,

Elijah

9 Things You Need To Be Successful At Bum Marketing

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a huge fan of bum marketing – the art of making money online using completely free resources – and I’ve successfully used these techniques on TheAtHomeCouple.com and every other blog that I own and operate. One of my favorite methods of free traffic generation and link building is article marketing because not only is it possible to write 20 articles in 20 days, like WAHM Tara’s latest challenge, it’s also amazing for developing your writing speed and research skills.

Over my 8 months of trial and error with utilizing free resources online, I’ve definitely learned a thing or two about what’s absolutely needed to be a successful bum marketer so I figured I would share some of my best tips with all you sexy people.

A good house coat or robe is essential to your productivity. Make sure it has at least two pockets for storing vital tools like the remote control and extreme cheddar flavored Gold Fish.
Always have Google open in a browser window off to the side. One of the key factors to successfully finding free resources online is your ability to research and grab those hidden gems such as free plug ins and cute little tools like SocialMarker.
I always make sure I have my Spaceballs dvd ready to be played at a moments notice – taking your mind off work for 15 minutes will do wonders whenever you become overwhelmed or hit a road block.
Having your peers available for brainstorming or questions always helps. Keep 3-5 buddies on your Skype contacts list that you go to if you want a second opinion.
The ability to go several days without showering or shaving will really get you into the “bum” mode. If you can grow a beard like me, or not shave your legs for a week or two, you’ll be on your way to bum marketing super stardom in no time!
You can’t expect to build your arsenal of free resources on an empty stomach. Being able to make a grilled cheese sandwich with one hand while submitting articles with the other is the sign of a true marketing master.
Practice getting things for free like pizza and beer when you’re out with your friends. They’ll eventually assume you’re always broke and start to give you free shit without you having to ask.
Make a folder in your Firefox bookmarks to store all your hardcore bum marketing tools and sites. This will help you develop a system when you’re launching a new site or product.
Purchase a handful of “generic” domain names to use for redirecting to related affiliate products from the author/resource box of your articles. If you find a hot offer, the last thing you want to do is build a site just to test it out – write a kick ass article and load up the redirect straight to the affiliate product.

Cheers,

Elijah

Site Flipping Madness – The Cherry Popping Report

I’m back and ready to rock! I made a conscious effort to take this weekend to relax and unwind with Veronica, and we did just that. Friday night we went with some friends to see a Bedouin Soundclash show, Saturday we spent the entire day in bed watching television, and Sunday we went out for a great lunch and impulsively bought another laptop. Sweet!

Before I get into my site flip report, I just want to say how much Veronica and I appreciate the support from each and every one of you. Your words of encouragement really kept me going over this last week, and a few of you even went as far as emailing me personally and sharing tips and tricks you’ve picked up through your own site flipping experiences. I’m not going to mention names, but just know that I know who you are, and I want you to know that the kindness will be reciprocated at the first opportunity. I never forget!

Time for the report…

If any of you are just tuning in, last week I challenged myself to generate $84.85 (the money Veronica and I spent on groceries) by the end of day September 15th – this was shortly after I posted a minor freakout with regards to never following through, and my fear of failure with making money online. After a few adjustments I ended up taking the route of building a blog, getting it indexed in Goolge for a high search/low competition key phrase, and then posting it up on the Sitepoint Marketplace in hopes that someone would have an interest and purchase it.

After conducting some ninja research with the best keyword tool in the universe, Wordtracker, I decided I would base the site around the competitive, but super profitable Tattoo niche – with my golden key phrase being Russian Mafia Tattoos. Why did I choose that key phrase? Well to put it plainly, Wordtracker told me to. That particular phrase has over 600 searches per day in Google, with less than 1100 competing websites listed in Google and this means two things – it won’t be too difficult to get on the front page of Google because the competition isn’t that fierce, and 600 searches per day is a great number in terms potential organic traffic should I get the number 1 spot.

So what happened?

I posted the auction up on Friday at 3:36 pm with a $0 minimum bid, a $97 reserve and a Buy Now price of $127 – which is higher than my initial $84.85 goal. At 5:47 pm I received an email from Sitepoint notifying me that my auction had been won! Not only did I sell the site in under 3 hours, it was purchased at the Buy Now price which means there was zero bidding going on. I was so shocked when I got the email that I called Veronica, who was on her way home from work, and starting laughing frantically like a Priest who accidentally walked into the “little girls room” at Bible Camp.

(Insert uncomfortable pause for those who are sensitive)

Here is everything I did spread over 4 days, from beginning to finish:

Day ONE

Logged into Wordtracker’s Keyword Researcher Tool and conducted a search using the keyword “Tattoos”
Filtered the results to list from the highest to lowest KEI – or the most to the least profitable
Chose the term “Russian Mafia Tattoos” which has the 3rd highest KEI, because my best friend Dmitri is Russian and I thought it would be fun to school him on his own history.
Went to Godaddy.com and searched for RussianMafiaTattoos.com – it was available so I bought it and pointed the DNS servers to my Hostgator account.

Day TWO

Called J-Weezy from SuiteJ.com, told him about the domain I purchased and asked him as many questions as I could regarding flipping sites, increasing value, transactional procedure and writing a killer sales letter/auction page – if you need to learn about site flipping go to his blog and get reading.
Logged onto Skype and started trading links to old school hip hop videos with SutieJ via the instant messaging feature.
3 hours later I realized how unproductive we were being and told him I had to go get some work done. Once he was finished crying I logged off of Skype and began searching for WordPress themes.
After sifting through a few I decided to go with a super functional theme by Alexandru Cosmin.
I logged into my cPanel admin and installed WordPress on RussianMafiaTattoos.com. I uploaded the theme and all my ninja plug ins using Filezilla, activated everything, and configured the settings to my liking.
I immediately began researching the Russian Mafia, and collecting Russian Mafia Tattoo images in a folder for use on the site.
I wrote 12 key phrase focused posts for the site and post-dated the settings to publish two per day – one at 10 am and then again at 10 pm spread them out over the following 6 days.

Day THREE

I wrote a 300+ word article, using my key phrase in the title and strategically throughout the content, and submitted it to 4 high traffic, high ranking article directories.
I created a medium sized Squidoo lens based around my topic.
Using Adobe Fireworks I created a custom logo, affiliate banner, and favicon icon for the site, and replaced the default images which were provided.
I went to Clickbank, gathered my affiliate links and banners, and incorporated them skillfully throughout the site. I also set up my adsense and incorporated the code into the posts and sidebar.
I created a Myspace page for the site, and put a few posts in the blog section with links.
I submitted the site to a handful of social bookmarking sites, and a few blog directories. You can visit the sales page for more details on which ones.
I found a few do-follow blogs in the same niche and spent some time commenting on their posts.

Day FOUR

I realized I had the number 1, 2, and 5 spot on the first page in Google for “Russian Mafia Tattoos” in quotes and the number 5 and 6 spots for the same term without quotes.
I created an account on Sitepoint.com, and started studying some auctions and sales pages that I liked and began to construct my own.
I almost finished the best sales page ever written and accidentally clicked on a link that took me away from the page (which was saved) and I had to start all over again.
I contemplated throwing my laptop through the window.
I proceeded to finish the sales page, take the necessary screenshots, and post up the auction.

Wow, that was a lot longer than I anticipated.

I don’t feel like writing anymore. I’ll finish up my thoughts later.

Cheers,

Elijah

Site Flipping Madness – Bum Marketing Update 837

Hey guys.

I don’t have too much to say right now except that I’m exhausted, and would have preferred to do a video post but I can’t find the SD card for my digi cam – dammit Veronica! Anyways, I have successfully flipped my niche blog and it is now live and active on the Sitepoint Marketplace. I’m nervous, tired, and accomplished all in one breath. This was a great experience and I look forward to my next flip, but first things first..

I’m going out tonight to see the Bedouin Soundclash in concert – for those of you who’ve never heard of them they are a local ska band from Toronto who rock with good vibrations. Check them out.

Time to get drunk.

Cheers,

Elijah

Roll With The Punches – Update 3

When I announced to the world (the 150 of you that come by everyday whom we adore) that I challenged myself, while waiting in line at the grocery store, to generate the equivalent of that shopping bill in affiliate commissions by the end of the week, I thought I had it all figured out. Little did I know…

Though my original plan was well thought out, and in theory would begin to generate affiliate income, I quickly realized that 1 week is not enough time to implement the particular bum marketing techniques I was planning to use – so I had to change my plan and roll with the punches.

As I began to gather up my Lemmings and inform them of the labor shift , I noticed a common theme recently amongst my peers and partners in the Blogosphere – Site Flipping! After reading some awesome challenges and making a phone call to one of my Bloggerhood Ninjas, I concluded that site flipping is probably the most efficient way to make a quick buck with little to no financial investment – which would enable it to fall into my Bum Marketing Madness theme perfectly!

So over the last few days I have managed to do the following:

Find a niche and key phrases that have a high KEI rating using Wordtracker
Purchased a domain name that contains one of my selected key phrases
Researched affiliate networks and found 3 niche related products to promote
Selected a theme that will provide functional as well as aesthetic elements to my WordPress 2.6.2 back end.
Designed a custom logo to replace the stock header, and a few custom banners for Clickbank products using Adobe Fireworks CS3
Compiled a folder of images for the posts.
Researched and wrote 10 posts, all spread out and post-dated between Tuesday and Friday.
Submitted the site and posts to Digg, Stumble Upon, and bookmarked it in Technorati, delicious and furl.
Fully integrated Google Adsense and my selected Clickbank products into the theme and content.
Created a Squidoo lens using the same keywords and images from some of my posts, with completely rewritten content.

What’s left to do?

Today I’m hopefully going to complete 3 possible tasks to increase the value of my site flip once it hits the Sitepoint.com marketplace. The first thing I’m going to do after completing this post is write an article based on my primary key phrase and submit it to 5 or 6 of the high ranking article directories – with the domain name linked in the resource box of course! This will get one way links pointing towards the site and increase it’s value and positioning for my main key phrase – currently I have my Digg submit in the number 3 position as of last night, and I’m almost positive by the end of day tomorrow that my Squidoo lens and Ezine article submission will take the remaining top spots.

My second task is going to be creating a profile on Myspace and a few other social and blogging networks, and adding some friends and posts to these pages that point back to the site – again for one way links, but to also give the site some social value which is important with Web 2.0 style blogs. Lastly if all is well I’d like to submit the blog to some of the better known blog directories and maybe do some more commenting on niche related sites and forums.

My plan is to have the sales copy written and the auction up on Sitepoint.com by early evening Friday. If all goes well I will sell the site by Sunday for at least $100, which I don’t see being a problem, and accomplish my goal of making back the grocery money we had to put on Veronica’s credit card because we’re broke. This was my challenge to myself, and I am going to complete it while teaching myself how to flip websites for profit and spending nothing but time to do so.

See you guys at the finish line.

Cheers,

Elijah