A Guide to Affiliate Marketing in Australia

Social media is now a daily activity that millions of people around the world consume and participate in. This is the first time in human history that anyone, no matter who you are or where you are has an opportunity to create, share, and prosper, and if you’re going to succeed and stand out in a heavily crowded social media ocean, you need to earn your audience’s trust.

For those entrepreneurs who have increasingly turned to crowdfunding to fund their projects as advertising dollars dry up, earning trust has become especially important. If you fail in earning the public trust, your project won’t go anywhere, and you won’t be able to raise funds. If you rely on your users to financially support your product, then earning their trust is paramount, because they’re not going to back you if they don’t trust you.

Below is a list of ten things you must do to earn the trust of your online audience. The list is written from a crowdfunding perspective, but this advice really applies to anyone working in social media and seeking the trust of their users.

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Earning the Public Trust

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1. Tell us who you are. Do you have a website with your name as the domain? If not, get a social networking profile, fill it out completely, and use the domain to point to your profile.

2. Choose your best picture. Common sense, right? But you also want to avoid staged photos that look like you’re selling real estate. Look for a photo that tells your story and use it consistently across all your profiles.

3. Don’t setup a profile on every network. Find your tent poles (Twitter (), Facebook ()), then use one or two smaller networks, like FourSquare () and Streamy (), and maintain a healthy presence on them. This way, you are where the crowd currently is, and positioned for where they will be.

4. Own your subject. You don’t need to be an expert at first. You should work hard to become one, but when you’re starting out, you should find the book other books and websites in your area reference. Read that book. As time goes on, pick up the books that book referenced. Most non-fiction books tend to regurgitate what’s already out (ditto for websites), but by going to the core book and then going from there you will be ahead of the game.

5. Don’t be fake. A problem many people face online is that we’re sensitive to what everyone wants, so we try to fake it. Nobody wants to give money to a phony. Take the material you’ve learned and put your own spin on it. It won’t be for everyone, but everyone won’t give you money, anyway. People who like and trust you, however, will. Find your voice and the people it appeals to.

6. Be Available. Can I call you? Can I send snail mail? If you want money from your audience and press attention, you need to provide a way to quickly and easily contact you.

7. Be Transparent. For any project using your audience’s money, you too have to be “Obama-like” in your transparency. Public budgets, public documents, public receipts, even your emails should be public. Not everything has to be released in the early stages — many crowdfunders fear the loss of their idea to a competitor — but when the project is in motion, open your vaults.

8. Write for the web. People won’t trust what they won’t read. Keep your material short, simple, and useful. Use sub-headings, have a great first sentence (your lead), and keep the article short.

9. Document everything. How are you keeping us posted? Use video more than tweets and blog posts, and update your audience (at least) once a week. Video () is the most personal method of online communication.

10. Answer every message. Tweets, video comments, emails. Answer everything. Even if it takes you forever, reply to everyone. If you are building an audience, you have a responsibility (and note, I’m saying you, not your assistant) to reply to your audience until the project has finished.

Earning the public trust takes time. But by following these ten steps consistently, you will be able to help your project succeed.

I enjoy buying a good domain name and building out a mini-site on the domain name and then receiving amazing amounts of traffic for very little of work done.

Maybe its the good SEO or the good process that I carry out. Its also has to do with the domain name and the competition that is currently there for the registered term.

1. First I either normally have an idea in my mind first for a mini-site and then use google keyword tool to find the most searched term that will provide targeted traffic for a physical product or services in the real world.

2. I also check with google.com.au or which ever tld google your website is going to focus on and to type in the phrase and see what the advertising is like. If there is three yellow sponspored adverts at the top then the advertising is strong and is likely that the content google advertising is strong. Google keyword tool has a feature to give you idea for advertising competition and also pay per click.

3. For a mini site to work I have had good success with domain names with a little over 100 hundred “exact” match searches per month. There is less competition for these terms and the sites rank easy for 1-2 in google. The more searches the better as whatever term you register its going to really help you rank well in google for that term. If you have a high exact search term there is also going to be direct navigation.

E.g laptopcomputers.com, appleiphones.com,

These are just for an example of the type of domains you want to register. Generic domain name. With exact search term over 100. Better if its over 1000 really. Do you research on the pay per click etc, the competition for the term. See what the website that is number one going for it, links, seo and decide how easy it would be to get your site ranked number one.

4. Using google adword keyword tool, I also use the “phrase” option to investigate the pages to produce for the site. As I belive having the keyword domain for the term is going to help rank for the phrase terms as well. So you should produce pages for these terms as you have the upper hand.

For example. hats.com; so you would have pages like hats.com/brown-hats.html, hats.com/pink-hats.html

5. I think 3 – 5 worded domain name is enough, not any more.

6. Once I register the domain, I add it to a resource/link page of a current website of mine to get into the search engines a.s.a.p. This can take 1-2 weeks to get into all the search engines.

7.Then using wordpress I build out the site.

8.Develop and write unique content for the site.

9. They send me the content ready to go or I get them to log in to my wordpress site to add blog entires for me.

10. Then its a copy and paste job for me.

11. Find some photos and you tube videos.

12. Remember to use alt tags, h1 , h2 tags. good meta tags all good seo.

13. The registered term for the minisite domain name. I use this in the meta description and the title. With the title of your index page. I find the first three words the most important in the title. For example if the site was Bridesmaiddresses.com

The title will be:Bridesmaid Dresses | Patterns, Plus-size, Maternity

Description for search engines: Bridesmaid dresses have come along way in the last year. Patterns, plus-size and matenity bridesmaid dress’s is availalbe now from our new online site.

14. I either add adsense to the site straight away or wait and try and do link building with related websites. (so it doesnt look spammy) and then add google adsense slowly.

15. I haven’t found google to effect my search rankings if I add the maximum adverts straight away. If you have at least 400 words per page and a photo or video its enought content.

16. Add Google anaylitics to check out the visitors etc and search terms etc.

17. Use google webmaster tools to register a sitemap with them.

18. Try to get into some web directories there are good and bad ones. Some give link juice to you.

19. When link building for your mini-site focus on the search terms with little competition. For example they may have only 16 exact search a month. This is a term you have a good chance of ranking number 1 for as you have the keyword domain. As your site matures etc you can go for more competitive keywords.

20. Even with a mini-site down the track you can look at selling advertising directly to an end-user.

An affiliate niche is simply an area of affiliate marketing that you and your website/s focus on. So what’s the best and easiest way to find the niche your are going to go after?

Choose something you enjoy

Many people make the mistake of simply going for affiliate products that everyone else is promoting as well and as a result lose interest quickly and never really make any money from their affiliate marketing business. Choose a niche that you enjoy and are passionate about such as dogs, cars, beauty tips etc and you will find it easier to stay on track and keep an interest in your affiliate quest!

Utilise the skills you already have

Are you good at something? Do you have specific talents or skills? All of these can give you ideas as to what niche you should be targeting. If you choose a product or service that relate to skills and talents you already have you will find it much easier to show customers about the products and how they can be used in their everyday life. You will also find it easier to educate people and attract traffic to your website through article marketing.

Choose a niche where there is demand

Being passionate about a topic and having skills related to it will not necessarily sell products. If there is not a demand for the things you are passionate about then the reality is you probably won’t be making much money.That is why it is important to also look for affiliate products that are in high demand and that other people want to buy as well.

Research your keywords

Since affiliate marketing is primarily online focused, it is important to find out what keywords people are looking for related to the products you are choosing and how popular these keywords are. Take some time to use keyword research tools (Google offers a very handy one) to find out how popular search terms for the products you want to sell are and whether it is worth pursuing.

What I suggest you do is write down a list of things you are passionate about and then use keyword research to find out how popular these topics are with others before choosing your affiliate marketing niche. If you do this it can end up saving you hundreds of dollars in testing a niche- as well as saving the initial setup effort along the way!

With the pressures of work and long hours these days, people are looking to alternative forms of income to help them boost their lifestyle, extra cash for the weekend or to ultimately work from home. Affiliate Marketing appears to be a simple way for people to start out with this goal but inevitably most will be doomed to failure.

Affiliate Marketing requires patience, persistence and a lot (and I mean a lot) of hard work. When I first started out in affiliate marketing I was working a 40-hour a week job + around 40 hours per week on affiliate marketing. When starting out you ask yourself on many occasions if this is the right thing to be doing, but when that first commission cheque comes through ($80 in my case) i gives you the boost you need and the will to continue with your work.

So what is the best way to start out in Affiliate Marketing? There is no true answer to this, as your working and home-life will affect any outcome. But if you have a push in the right direction prior to starting it can save some heartache, frustration and more importantly CASH!

Choosing your website niche

The first step in creating an affiliate presence is choosing your niche. You’re going to be working with this project for a long time so I suggest choosing something that you are interested in so you keep motivated. Choosing a niche you think makes money although you have no interest in will ultimately get the better of you. As things slow and your motivation witters away so will your dedication to the project and you will most likely drop your plan.

Website Design

From a customers perspective, this is your first point of presence with the customer. Once they are on your site they will evaluate whether to continue with your website or not within the first second. If you homepage is not inviting or covered in advertising they will most likely hot the back button on their browser and go to a competitors website.

So where is the best place to start? If you are not technical (like myself) you can either learn how to design websites from scratch or as I did learn how to utilise web templates to form your web presence. There are many FREE web templates that you can use for your design including:

- www.freewebtemplates.com
- www.freewebsitetemplates.com
- www.steves-templates.com

Once you have decided on your website layout you will need a WYSIWYG (What you see if what you get) editor. There are a few free editors avaialbe on the web but if you can grab a copy of Dreamweaver it will make your life much easier!