A Guide to Affiliate Marketing in Australia

Every business involves some risks that need to be managed by the person running the business. Affiliate marketing is no different and needs the affiliate marketer to manage the risks involved. To be able to manage risks, it is important to forecast the risks well. Let us explore some of the risks that are involved in affiliate marketing, and how you could deal with them.

1. Search Engine shocker: Most of your visitors come from search engines. People search for the information on the popular search engines like Google, which then pops up a list of searched relevant links. The users then click on one of the links to visit the particular website. As a website owner, you will always hope that the user clicks on your link. However, you firstly need to ensure that your link gets displayed in the searched list. For this, you will need to do continuous SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for your website. The risk is that you have little control over the success of your SEO. Your rank may fall down abruptly or you may even find your link out of the list. This could be a big shock for your business. One of the ways to avoid this risk is to opt for PPC (Pay per Click) like the Adwords program from Google. Herein, you pay for a specific page rank and the program maintains you on this rank for a specific period.

2. Merchant turns his back on you: What if one fine day you get an email from your merchant telling you that he is not interested in working with you anymore? You may also realize that the merchant is not paying you well, or on time. This could hit your business as well. To avoid such awkward situations, it is advisable to work with multiple merchants at a time. It is highly unlikely that all the merchants will turn their back on you or that all of them will not pay well.

3. Sudden decrease in traffic flow: Your affiliate marketing business thrives on the traffic flow into your website. If ever the traffic inflow reduces, your business will suffer huge losses. The best way to avoid this situation is to update the content on your website regularly. Additionally, the quality of the content must be good and very informative. People always look for website, which has informative, interesting, and unique content.

4. Hosting jolts: Your website needs to be on air at all times and only then can it do the business for you. If your website gets offline abruptly, it will hit your business in many ways. Not only will you lose out on new visitors but also your existing visitors may not visit your site again if they encounter a temporarily dead site. This can happen if your website is hosted by a poor web hosting company. You must therefore avail the hosting services from a reliable hosting service provider.

5. Website maintenance: You will need to update your website regularly. You would want to add new features to it as well as fix some exiting bugs if any. All this may be difficult to do if your webmaster quits for some reason. The best way is to develop a good knowledge of website development and maintenance, so that you do not need to be dependent on any one else for maintenance.

Adwords is a text based advertisement program that is designed by Google for those people, who run their businesses online. The idea behind Google Adwords is to allow webmasters to create ads to promote their online business and have these ads placed in the most lucrative places on the web. Google places these ads for you, in an advertising network.

The best thing about Google Adwords is that webmasters can choose their own set of keyword phrases to match their business. This helps draw more targeted audience to click on your ads and to checkout the landing pages of your ads, thereby improving the conversion rates of your advertisement. Another great thing about Google Adwords is that unlike the conventional advertisement systems (wherein you need to make a payment to display your ads), you need to pay only when a prospective customer clicks on your ad. As a result of this cost per click plan, webmasters are able to cut down on their advertising costs.

With Adwords, Google places your ads either within the Google result pages or on some websites that are linked up with Google. It is very lucrative to have ads placed in the search pages as the ads are exposed to a highly targeted audience. When a user searches for some information on the Google search engine, then along with the search results, Google also displays advertisements that are most relevant and closely related to the keywords that are mentioned in the search string. These ads would obviously interest the users as they are related and relevant to the information they have been looking for on the web.

Apart from search results pages, Google also publishes your ads on the relevant websites (Google network). For example, if your ads talk about protein supplements, Google would have these ads published on the websites that talk about health, supplements, and other relevant topics.

It is entirely your choice to select the spots where you want to display your ads. You also have a choice to select the desired format of your ads. In fact, there are a number of formats available for advertisements that include images, text, and videos. Google also provides you with regular updates and reports about the performance of your ads in your Google accounts.

You get charged as and when any user clicks on your ad. The charges vary depending on the ads and the bidding for keyword phrases. You will have to pay an activation fee to get started.

Some of the highlights of Google Adwords are listed below:

1. You can directly reach the interested people rather than waste time with the people not interested in your product or service. There is a better chance of increasing your conversion rate with the interested people.
2. You can decide your ad budget and plan accordingly. Google gives you complete control over your ad budget.
3. You can customise your ads at any time you like. You can also switch between the different formats of the ads made available to you.
4. Your ads get shown up immediately after you have created them.
5. Because Google is the most desired search engine today, there are more and more people visiting your ad links.

To top it, Google also provides you with excellent customer care. They provide an online help center which answers most of the queries. There is a good set of FAQ’s there and other detailed information. You can also email them and they would reply back in a couple of days.

The overall success of your online business depends on you as an affiliate as well. You must include the right kind of keywords in your ads. Also, the links can only take the user to your website. It is then up to you and your website to convert the visitors into your customers. This makes it important for you to have your website well organised and well managed.

If you have been trying to find out ways of making money online, then you must definitely have come across the term ‘Adsense’. This is perhaps one of the most talked about terms on the web. Before we discuss how you could make money with Adsense, let us understand what Adsense actually is all about.

Adsense is a money making program created by Google. There are numerous webmasters fighting to find a place in the Google search pages. All of them strive to find a higher rank in the result pages. It is obviously a tedious task and the positive outcome is not guaranteed. Google, therefore, came up with another program for the webmasters called the ‘pay per click’ (PPC) program or the Google Adwords. With this program, the interested webmasters can have their website links placed in the Google search pages at a desired rank. There is a separate section for these sponsored links on the search pages. The webmasters will obviously have to pay good amount of money to Google for this service. Depending on the desired rank, Google charges the webmasters for each click on these links. This is, however, only half of the entire story about Google Adsense.

It is obviously not possible for Google to place all these sponsored links on the search pages as the number of sponsored links are very huge in number. Google therefore, publishes many of these links on its networked websites. This is where Adsense comes into play. You, as a website owner, can register with Google and have your website listed in the networked sites of Google. Once your website is part of the Google advertising network, Google will send you a set of links that you will need to add to the HTML pages of your website. Once done, your website will immediately display the Google Ads.

Every visitor of your website who clicks on any of these sponsored links will earn you a commission. As soon as a visitor clicks on the sponsored link, Google charges the link owner some amount of money. Google will then pay you some amount of money as commission. The amount of money you get paid is never revealed and is random. You may get paid as much as $0.2 to $0.8 per click.

You will have to apply for Adsense with Google. You will need to provide some of your details and the URL of your website. Only if your website gets selected can you get started with the Adsense program. Some of the points that you must keep in mind to ensure that your website gets selected are listed below:

1. Your website must contain unique and original content. Websites with plagiarized and duplicate content are never selected.
2. There must be no broken links in the content as well as in the web address.
3. The website should have a good number of quality, one-way, back links and a healthy count of out bound links. However, the inbound links count must obviously be pretty much higher that the outbound links from your website.
4. The average flow of traffic is important. More the flow of traffic, more are the chances of your selection for Adsense.
5. Your website must abide by the policies listed by Google. The policies are available at their site.

Google Adsense is undoubtedly the best money making program on the web today. You will need to be strategic in your approach and will need to make sure that you abide by the Google policies.

Affiliate marketing has been given a tremendous boost with the new social media marketing craze that is sweeping the internet. Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook has given affiliates a little more opportunity when gaining new customers and earning more commissions.

Facebook is a social network, much like MySpace, where you connect, network, and share things in your life with people who you are friends with. Facebook, once a domain of high school kids and young adolescents playing games and hooking up, is now a legitimate force in internet marketing. Affiliate marketing is no different. Here’s three powerful ways you can earn more commissions with Facebook.

Connect With Others Within Your Niche

Facebook allows you to search for people according to name, network, school, and even keywords is done correctly. Try to search for people within your own niche or topic of the product your are marketing.

Most affiliates market several products so you have two options available to you. You can select one or two closely related products and focus your Facebook marketing in these areas or you can purchase Facebook Ads. These are like Pay Per Click ads on Google, but show up on the profiles of people who have something to do with the topic of the ad.

Start A Group Around The Topic Of Your Affiliate Product

Groups and fan pages are big topics on Facebook right now. And for good reason. They are generally good places to do specific, targeted promotion of products. For instance, if you are an affiliate for a car product, you can start a group for car enthusiasts. When sending notices to your group you can mention your product, or website. Not only do you get marketing, but you also meet others, can connect with them and build strong relationships.

Write Notes

Facebook notes are almost like having your own blog. Whenever you write a new note then everyone on your friend list gets notified. You have the options of “tagging” people with your note also so that their friends are also notified.

For running your affiliate program, you have the option of using an in house affiliate program or an affiliate network. There and advantages and disadvantages both.

The advantages of using an affiliate network
Affiliate networks can provide you exposure to lots of affiliates. Affiliate networks already have a base of affiliates that they are working where they can market your affiliate program. They can also add you to their affiliate marketing blogs, affiliate forums, affiliate newsletters, affiliate Facebook groups. Affiliate networks also promote affiliate programs at affiliate events and affiliate marketing conferences like Affiliate Summit and Ad:tech. Affiliate networks also recruit affiliates to promote your campaign.
Affiliate networks are trusted by affiliates as a third party to ensure that they receive their affiliate payments. After all, the affiliate network only gets paid when the affiliates have made sales.
Affiliate networks take care of much of the affiliate tracking and they have an in house team monitoring this to ensure it is always working.

The affiliate network acts as a clearing house and manages all affiliate payments. Making one payment to an affiliate network which then pays out thousands of individual affiliates will take a lot of burden off your affiliate accounts department.

Working with an affiliate network will provide someone with knowledge and expertise to help you setup your program and guide you thought the initial stages.

Advantages of In House programmes
In house affiliate programs can be easily setup with off the shelf affiliate software and have the advantage that they are no affiliate network fees to pay. This can be critical in marketing with very tight margins or on a low budget. Some shopping carts have affiliate marketing software built in.

All in all if you’re looking to start out in Affiliate Marketing my suggestion is to begin with the networks so you can gain some automatic exposure and target affiliates who already know what they are doing rather than starting an affiliate program fresh and targeting potential affiliates- having to explain how affiliate marketing actually works!

The dawning of the internet has dramatically changed so many aspects of our lives. Rather than spending time walking around the shopping centre, we are ever more inclined to pull up a chair by the computer and dive into the world of the web and the numerous bargains it offers. For the entrepreneurial amongst us this has opened the window of opportunity wider than ever before, with people from around the globe able to promote the products and services they offer.

What’s more, those able to do the promoting can take a cut of the value of the sale; a win win situation for all involved. Affiliate marketing has provided financial freedom to thousands of individuals around the world and its popularity is continuing to increase.

For those wishing to cash in on the success of affiliate marketing you need not feel completely alone. There are many affiliate marketing networks to help you discover products to promote. Before selecting a network, it would be wise to do some research as to which will suit you best – although there is no reason not to join more than one.

Perhaps the most important factor is that of industry focus. One of the most common mistakes among new affiliates is to be lured by the high earnings potential of incredibly competitive sectors such as consumer finance, electronics or even the adult industry. You are best to focus on areas where you have genuine insight and passion. Building an affiliate business is a long haul and you are competing with just about everyone that has access to the web so differentiation is vital. Once you have decided on one or more sectors, you can then seek out suitable affiliate programs and networks.

ClixGalore is one of the best known affiliate marketing networks in Australia. With over 20,000 different digital products on display for you to promote and commissions of up to 75% of the value of the sale, this isn’t a great surprise. It’s free to sign up as an affiliate and there is in most cases no waiting around for the approval of the merchant of the product which enables you to start selling quickly and easily.

If you`re looking to sell for some well known brands such as ANZ, Apple or Foxtel you might want to consider using DGM as your affiliate marketing network. Everything from flowers to books, music and fashion are available for promotion through this network.

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In Australia we currently only have a few Affiliate Networks to choose from. Below is a list of the major networks along with their contact details.

ClixGalore

clixGalore Affiliate Marketing is a large affiliate network comprising of over 7500+ Merchants and many ten of thousands of Affiliates across our five main networks in the Australia, New Zealand, UK, USA and Japan.

ClixGalore have the largest range by far of any Australian network and I suggest joining their network as an affiliate as they have an easy to follow affiliate interface.

Commission Payouts: Month following commissionable activity

Commission Monster

Australia ’s leading affiliate network has gone global!

With a global market for products just a click away, advertisers are spending billions of dollars to access consumers on the internet.

For businesses with a keen eye on their margins the focus is on generating low-risk, high-volume sales; and successfully ‘incentivising’ the market

Commission Monster meets all of your online advertising needs providing a fully developed pay-for-performance service where you determine the performance criteria.

Our product is specifically tailored for today’s competitive online environment.

Founded in Melbourne ( Australia), the Company has been providing our own proprietary Commission Monster Technology and infrastructure tools and services to advertisers and advertising agencies since 2003.

In late 2007 they launched into the US market and most recently, the UK market.

Commission Payouts: 3 months after commissionable activity

DGM

DGM usually only attract the higher end affiliate programs such as Qantas, Optus, ANZ etc. The network is closely monitored and you will need to apply for advertiser approval on each campaign you wish to promote.

Commission Payouts: 2 months after commissionable activity

Jumbo Affiliates

Jumbo is the newest affiliate network to be launched in Australia and I had the pleasure of being apart of the launch stage in July 2007.

Jumbo Affiliates has over 150 affiliate programs to choose from and their tracking is live so there is no waiting around for 24 hours to see results of a newly launched campaign.

Commission Payouts: Month following commissionable activity