In our series of article marketing tricks, here's the 4th secret to making article marketing pay off for you -- long tails and bums.

While article marketing itself has been around for decades, about as long as there have been articles, bum marketing has only been around for 2-3 years.

The term Bum Marketing was coined because it's supposed to be so easy that even a homeless bum on the street can use the method and make money. While I don't know whether that exact scenario has ever been tested, I do know that the principle behind the method is proven.

The main difference between regular article marketing and bum marketing is that in the latter you're targeting specific key words or phrases so when people do a search on Google your article rises to the top.

The keyword research is really what makes a difference in bum marketing, because you're looking for words and phrases that are searched on as many times as possible, but still have a very low number of competing sites.

For example, in the golf niche you probably wouldn't target the phrase "proper golf swing" in your article. While it does have 16,890 searches per month, it also has 50,700 competing sites/pages.

However, the phrase "overcoming golf swing inertia" has 2,430 searches per month and only 524 competing sites/pages. Yes, the number of searches is much less than "proper golf swing" but you're not dealing with nearly the amount of competition -- and that's a very good thing!

The cool thing about targeting those "long tail" keywords is that it gives you a way to compete in some of the bigger markets without spending an arm and a leg on pay-per-click or other types of advertising.

Once you've decided on a niche and done the research to find the long-tail keywords you want to target, you write your articles.

With regular article marketing you might not care that much about putting specific keywords into your article, but with bum marketing that's exactly what you need to do. You're going to want to make sure 3-4% of your text is your keyword phrase -- and the balancing act here is not to make it look like you're "keyword stuffing" -- article directories don't like that and will refuse articles they think are gaming the system.

Sidebar: If you're submitting your articles to an online directory, be sure and follow their guidelines to the letter. If they don't like anything more than 1% keywords, for example, then don't put in 3%-4% and hope you get by -- that's not the kind of relationship you want with a site that has the power to send you thousands of visitors.

The key with bum marketing is that you're not trying to get traffic directly from the article directories, you're looking for organic traffic from the search engines when people look for that those long-tail keywords you're targeting.

If you take a little time with your writing you can create an article that's good for "normal" article marketing, and at the same time can be used for bum marketing -- that's the best way to get the most targeted traffic from a single article.