When it comes to Bum Marketing, in the words of Dean Shainin, "Expound!" Okay, that's one word, but let's move on...

Once you learn the basics of article marketing, a whole world of possibilities becomes available. In addition to all the variations of affiliate marketing and promoting your own products via your articles, all the other means of pursuing online profits become a lot clearer. It's through the development of relationships with your peers that means and methods of creating revenue become possible.

Not surprisingly, many folks who start out with Bum Marketing find they do not like it. In fact, they learn the valuable lesson that Bum Marketing, in itself, is not for them. That includes me. No question, creating a profit out of thin air, electrons and some persuasive text was amazing. However, as a life's work, it does not inspire me. In fact, I'd be content to take the lessons learned and leave it alone.

I'll leave the blogs up with their affiliate links, continue to feed articles (on a limited basis) to EzineArticles.com and will put autoresponder forms on all the pages and blogs to capture those who are interested in more info about each niche where appropriate (some of them will be phased out).

The real focus of my efforts will be in the area of a subset of "Rich Marketing" -- small business owners. It's apparent to me that most folks who pursue IM sell to each other, if they're participating in discussion forums like The Warrior Forum and others like it. However, that's only a tiny fraction of the Internet. Further, as more and more people and businesses get online (the ones with a lot of money, that is), they will start spending it on stuff other than "The Death of IM Infoproducts."

Since I've already seen the effectiveness of reaching very small brick-and-mortar businesses as a way of increasing revenue, I will aggressively pursue building a little village of niche sites for them. Local businesses often have no idea about how to put themselves online and be found by potential customers. SEO is just a mystery to them.

By offering local business owners here in Scranton a 'Front Door' page that show up on the first page of Search Engine results, the benefit for them is obvious -- more potential revenue from local searches. By adding in a call to action to either go to the store or call them on the phone, in-store traffic can increase with little or no additional effort on their part!

Now, imagine adding several high-ranking references from authority Websites (like a Squidoo lens, for example) which push the competition off the first page of the SERP's (Search Engine Result Pages). Your business could actually dominate local Search Engine Marketing efforts. This is a unique approach to getting offline businesses positioned well on the Internet.

You can go to Money-Making Websites, LLC for more information on how you could be doing this for your small business -- or for small businesses in your local market.

I'll update the progress of this pursuit as it happens...

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