A Guide to Affiliate Marketing in Australia

If you are looking for ways to make great money online, affiliate marketing is a great option. There is a famous saying which says – “do it not, if you find no good reason to do it”. To satisfy the quote, there is more than a single reason to consider affiliate marketing as a career path. We look to explore some of the top most reasons to support this argument.

1. There is no limit to your success: Affiliate marketing offers tremendous scope of success. You do not have a fixed salary to earn or a fixed path of growth. You can earn as much as you want and as much as you work. The world of internet is very vast and there are ample opportunities that internet marketing has on offer.

1. You are your own boss: You need not report to any one. You have no rules to abide by and no strict policies to follow. You can decide your own rules and own principles of work. In other words, you are the sole owner of your business. Most people complain that they do not get the freedom to work their way. Affiliate marketing is the right choice for such aspiring people.

1. There are no time restrictions: You have no 9 to 5 or any other time restrictions. When working for a company, you need to abide by the time and the number of work hours is fixed. With affiliate marketing, you can decide your own time of work and the number of hours you want to work daily.

1. There are many options: Affiliate marketers have many options to make money from. There are so many business opportunities floating on the internet that an affiliate can always switch from one option to another.

1. You are never at office: An affiliate can relax at home and make thousands of dollars. There is no office to report to.

Once you are an established affiliate marketer, your life becomes very easy and the life style is very lavish that most people only dream about. Imagine a website making money for you 24/7. You could be sleeping or on a holiday, and when you switch on your computer, you realize that your website has made hundreds or thousands of dollars for you.

Although everything that has been discussed so far sounds very rosy, there is another side to the story as well. An affiliate marketer has to be very dedicated and disciplined towards his work. The website needs to be updated and maintained periodically. Additionally, regular promotion of the website is very imperative as well. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important exercise that an affiliate always needs to do. There is no easy money in the world and everything needs efforts and the same holds true for affiliate marketing. The rewards for hard work are very good though.

There are many online guides, and courses, that provide a lot of information about affiliate marketing. Many courses are free and others are paid. There are many free affiliate marketing tutorials, which are only wastage of time. Therefore, you should opt for a reasonably priced tutorial package, which is informative and talks sense.

Compare Online Savings Accounts

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make great money on the internet. Although many people have been very successful with affiliate marketing, many others have experienced failures. We look to discuss some of the best tips that could play a vital role in your affiliate marketing program:

1. Select your topic wisely: There is no topic that is better than the other. It makes no sense to look out for a topic which is so called the most lucrative. The fact is that every topic has a great potential to earn you heaps of money. Internet is a vast world wherein millions of people surf. There are therefore all kinds of people with all kinds of interests. The key therefore is to opt for a website topic that interests you. Unless you really like the topic, you will not maintain it and update it for long. You have to be involved and have to enjoy the topic of your website.
   
2. It is not all about banners: There is no point to go bizarre in publishing multiple banner ads in the website. Visitors do not visit your website to click on the ads. They visit your website for some information. If you flood your website with heaps of ads, you will only annoy and chase the visitors out of your website.
   
3. Do not blame the merchant: Before you blame the merchant for poor profits, you must loom into your own progress and your business strategy. Your website has to do well for you before you can draw any other conclusions. A website is doing well only if it attracts visitors on regular basis.
   
4. Work for multiple merchants: Rather than just relying on one single merchant it is better to tie up with multiple merchants. If ever you are let down by a merchant it should not be end of the show. The same can be assured only if you are working for multiple merchants.
   
5. Promote your website wisely: Promoting your website is very imperative. The best way to do so is by publishing articles on the web, press releases and working on SEO.
   
6. How good is your content: Pay a lot of attention to the content of your website. It is the content that the visitors visit your website for. A good content adheres to the one that is unique, informative and well presented.
   
7. How good is the product you are promoting? It also helps to keep a close eye on the products that your merchant is selling. If the customers are not happy with the product, it can hurt your business too.
   
8. Ensure a good host: Your website needs to be up and running at all times. This can only be ensured with a good web host.
   
9. Analyze your traffic flow: Work on your weak pages and cash in on your string pages. There are many software tools that keep you informed of your traffic flow.
   
10. Restart from point 5: Affiliate marketing requires constant efforts. You need to perform point 5 to point 9 time and again and keep improving for better.

Affiliate marketing has created a boom in the world of internet. There are millions of people trying to be an affiliate today. Some of them go on to become super affiliates, some do just fine, and others fail to make a mark. We look to discuss what affiliate marketing is and then discuss a few tips to be successful at it.

In simple terms, affiliate marketing is a concept, wherein an online merchant pays an affiliate some money in return for bringing the merchant some customers. In other words, the affiliate makes efforts to get customers for the merchant and the merchant pays commission to the affiliate. An affiliate generally has his own website to do the affiliate marketing as it is a tedious task to do the affiliate marketing without your own website. Once you have your website, you can conduct affiliate marketing using this website, in three different ways. These three ways are enlisted below:

1. Pay per click: This is one of the most frequently used methods to earn money online using your own website. Herein, an affiliate publishes some links on the website. These links, when clicked, take the visitor to the merchant’s original website or a relevant landing page. Every time a visitor clicks on the links to visit the merchant’s website, the affiliate gets paid by the merchant. The amount of money could be in cents or even in dollars. The amount depends on the product and the affiliate agreement. Ideally, one should opt for such affiliate products businesses, which pay off a very high commission.

1. Pay per sale: If a sale is made as a result of affiliate’s efforts, then the merchant pays the affiliate some amount as a commission. The commission here is generally more than that in the PPC. Depending on the price of the product sold and the total units sold, the affiliate gets paid some fixed percentage.

1. Pay per lead: If a potential customer registers on the merchant’s website as a result of the affiliate’s efforts, the affiliate gets paid by the merchant for the lead provided. The amount of commission paid depends on the prior agreement done between the affiliate and the merchant.

As must be evident, the affiliate marketing business is a very good way to make money online. However, many people fail to make even a single penny. The most common mistake that people commit is that – they make no efforts either to draw targeted audience or to make conversions. The common misconception that ‘affiliate marketing can generate loads of money with zero efforts from our end’ is what leads to their failure. The fact is that there is no such way in the world to earn money without making the requisite efforts.

Mentioned below are some of the tips to ensure success with your affiliate marketing:

1. Give a lot of attention to your website and upgrade it regularly. You need to update the content of your website regularly to leave a reason for people to revisit your website.
2. You must have original content on your website. Repetitive and redundant text will never attract any viewers. Duplicate content will also hit the SEO of your website and hence there will be little flow of traffic to your website. So, beware and use only original, interesting, and informative content.
3. Make use of relevant, competitive, and popular keywords in the content. This is important to get traffic from the search engines.
4. Inbound and outbound links are very useful in attracting traffic to your website. So, focus on generating as many quality one-way backlinks for your website as you can.

Affiliate marketing needs constant and smart efforts and only then can one hope to be successful with it.

Now if you are one of many affiliates who prefer to rely on organic searches when creating your affiliate website, then you will know that the best time to prepare for Christmas is not now but during the winter.

By preparing for this period months in advance, you can give SE spiders plenty of time to visit your website whilst giving yourself time to tweak your SEO and get your website indexed.

But if on the other hand, you are new to affiliate marketing or have not completed your website yet, there is still time for you to join this group of successful affiliates and reap the rewards of all that Christmas has got to offer.

Remember, the January sales are still to come too. Bringing with it plenty of surfers who’ll be looking around for somewhere to spend their Christmas money.

So how can you quickly offer your affiliate website all these hidden extras, before you miss out? Simple. By incorporating the following tips:

Tip One: PPC

Before you take another step down this route, it is important that you first subscribe to WordTracker. This software will give you the tools and the creativity to truly spice up your affiliate website, plus enable you to benefit from all it has got to offer.

Now many affiliates will tell you that this is a tough area to crack, especially during Christmas. For a start, it is fiercely competitive, but as we said before, there is a way around this. By using WordTracker, you can target areas traditionally found outside of Google Adwords, and make your website unique.

Take Yahoo for example. You can still find good keywords here, as well as well searched terms –all that are currently underused.

So if your ready to be really competitive and are prepared to do sum real digging, searching on marketing, LookSmart and other popular PPC engines could be of a great benefit to you too. They are great for anyone who has got the imagination and the creativity to look outside the box and take in the bigger picture.

So whilst it may feel tempting to go for the more obvious keyword targets. By taking the time to do a little research and to look a little deeper into your chosen product niche, you can easily go beyond all the common generic terms and come up with something much more promising. A range of extensive keywords and phrases.

Tip Two: E-bay

Now we already know what you are thinking. What on earth has e-bay got to do with affiliate marketing? Well here is the thing, you may not be able to openly promote your products on E-BAY, but you can use it to grab some of this holiday traffic and bring it back to your affiliate website.

The question is: how?

No problem. All you really need to do is distract them – yes, that’s right, distract them. And one sure way to do this is to offer them inexpensive loss leaders (better deals); viral reports or even Christmas screensavers. Essentially anything that you can add your brand to, that will drive traffic away from e-bay and back to yourself.

Tip Three: Paid Inclusion

When it comes to indexing your affiliate website, the scenario usually plays out with it taking a few weeks to get it indexed – not good if you are wanting to get your website earning you profits… fast. But there is a solution, and one that could get your product website indexed in less than a week: Paid inclusion.

Now before you get too excited about this idea, we must tell you one thing. Just because you have paid to get your website included in a search engine, this won’t guarantee you a higher ranking. You’ll still need to do everything else to draw the right traffic towards you: PPC, SEO, Ezine ads… all the usual tricks and techniques that you would incorporate on a traditional website.

And if you do take the time to prepare your website correctly, paid inclusion can truly offer you great results: instant traffic, good indexing and much, much more – fast.

Tip Four: Content

This tip is particularly good if you have already got an affiliate website that is sending you some decent traffic. Here you can use your content – in one of two ways – to get more traffic to your website.

One, you can add a Christmas spin to your most popularly visited pages.  Now, this does not necessarily require a complete rewrite, but just enough of a change to provide you with new traffic leads (the use of Keywords is particularly important in making this tip effective).

Two, you can introduce 3-5 pages that are completely Christmas focused. Now with this one, you need to make sure that these pages fit in alongside the rest of your website and do not stand out for the wrong reasons. Get the right balance and you’ll find yourself still receiving all your usual traffic plus Christmas ones as well.

Tip Five: Opt-in List

This one can prove very helpful in regards to the last tip we mentioned. You see, opt-in lists are the perfect way to offer creative upsells and cross-sells to your current mailing list.

And you can do this in a variety of ways. For example you can offer subscribers links to special pages filled with Christmas bonuses, discounts, free gifts or even their very own personalised message. Or alternatively in true Christmas tradition you could include content filled with holiday poems and quotes, tips on how to wrap presents or holiday clip art.

Anything that will get them in the Christmas spirit and more interested in the versatility of your affiliate product.

And that is it. By incorporating any of these 5 tips into your affiliate website, you can bring your website up to standard all in preparation for Christmas.

Just make sure first that your website is ready to facilitate the traffic it is bound to receive from any one of these.

A disorganised website will turn all this extra work you have put in, into poor results and negative traffic. So prepare, prepare, prepare and get ready to join in the real competition.

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.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective and powerful ways of earning some money online. This program gives everybody a chance to make a profit through the Internet. Since these affiliate marketing programs are easy to join, implement and pays a commission on a regular basis, more an more people are now willing in this business.

However, like all businesses, there are lots of pitfalls in the affiliate marketing business. Committing some of the most common mistakes will cost the marketers a large portion taken from the profit they are making everyday. That is why it is better to avoid them than be regretful in the end.

Mistake number 1: Choosing the wrong affiliate.

Many people want to earn from affiliate marketing as fast as possible. In their rush to be part of one, they tend to choose a bandwagon product. This is the kind of products that the program thinks is “hot”. They choose the product that is in demand without actually considering if the product appeals to them. This is not a very wise move obviously.

Instead of jumping on the bandwagon, try top choose a product in which you are truly interested in. For any endeavor to succeed, you should take some time to plan and figure out your actions.

Pick a product that appeals to you. Then do some research about that product to see if they are in demand. Promoting a product you are more passionate about is easier than promoting one for the sake of the earnings only.

Mistake number 2: Joining too many affiliate programs.

Since affiliate programs are very easy to join, you might be tempted to join multiples of affiliate programs to try and maximize the earnings you will be getting. Besides you may think that there is nothing wrong and nothing to lose by being part of many affiliate programs.

True, that is a great way to have multiple sources of income. However, joining multiple programs and attempting to promote them all at the same time will prevent you from concentrating on each one of them.

The result? The maximum potential of your affiliate program is not realized and the income generated will not exactly be as huge as you were thinking initially it would. The best way to get excellent result is by joining just one program that pays a 40% commission at least. Then give it your best effort by promoting your products enthusiastically. As soon as you see that it is already making a reasonable profit, then maybe you can now join another affiliate program.

The technique is to do it slowly but surely. There is really no need to rush into things, especially with affiliate marketing. With the way things are going, the future is looking real bright and it seems affiliate marketing will be staying for a long time too.

Mistake number 3: Not buying the product or using the service.

As an affiliate, you main purpose is to effectively and convincingly promote a product or service and to find customers. For you to achieve this purpose, you must be able to relay to the customers that certain product and service. It is therefore difficult for you to do this when you yourself have not tried these things out. Thus, you will fail to promote and recommend them convincingly. You will also fail to create a desire in your customers to avail any of what you are offering.

Try the product or service personally first before you sign up as an affiliate to see if it is really delivering what it promises. If you have done so, then you are one of the credible and living testaments aware of its advantages and disadvantages. Your customers will then feel the sincerity and truthfulness in you and this will trigger them to try them out for themselves.

Many affiliate marketers makes these mistakes and are paying dearly for their actions. To not fall into the same situation they have been in, try to do everything to avoid making the same mistakes.

Time is the key. Take the time to analyze your marketing strategy and check if you are in the right track. If done properly, you will be able to maximize your affiliate marketing program and earn higher profits.

Point blank, misspelling that leads to traffic and search engine rankings is often done accidentally. And while most larger sites quickly corrects the copy, considering it only to be an embarrassing typo, for your small website misspelling should be seen as an acclaimed and proven effective SEO method.

Some time ago I was writing a news post on my blog about the unfortunate passing of one of our times greatest fashion icons; Mr Yves Saint Laurent. The blog was only weeks old, had been indexed but of course wasn’t ranking on any keywords or getting any traffic due to its slim content and none existing backlinks.

But as I was setting the title I “accidentally” misspelled Yves, making it Ywes instead. And apparently as I mistakingly misspelled this mans name, so did a number of people when searching on Google. So all of a sudden I was ranking and getting traffic, even though I according to the strict laws of Google really shouldn’t be.

Typos - 900 searches & no competition

The number of visitors was not more than 50 but it is a heck of a lot more than if I would have corrected my accidental typo. “Ywes Saint Laurent” has an approximate search volume in coming months merely reaching 22 searches. “Yves Saint Lauren” without the t in the end has about 900 monthly searches.

People’s, like myself, inability to spell correctly can thus benefit your website. Try listing some common typos related to your website niche and research their potential traffic volume with Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool. If you want traffic now and not endure the potentially long and time consuming period of SEO - misspelling may get you high rankings on frequently searched keywords tomorrow.

Making money online used to pretty much require you to have your own Web site, products to sell and some marketing savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know and who you know without you having to be a web designer or a marketing genius.

But it’s hard to tell hype from the real deal. If you do a search on “make money online” and “making money online”, and much of the information out there is just promoting various information products, mostly about Internet marketing. I see why people sometimes ask, “Is anyone making money online besides Internet marketing experts?”

So below is a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:

• Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win money
• Don’t require you to have your own Web domain or your own products
• Don’t involve any hard-selling
• Aren’t just promoting more Internet marketing
• Give a good return on your time investment

In the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.

Writing

A growing number of sites will pay for your articles or blog posts. Associated Content and Helium will “pay for performance” based on page views for just about anything you want to write about. Articles on specific topics they’re looking for can earn direct payments up to about $200. The rates are probably low for established writers, but if you’re trying to break into the field and have time on your hands, they’re a great way to start. Also, a lot of companies are looking for part-time bloggers. They may pay per post or on a steady contract.

Start your own blog.

You don’t have to have your own Web site, or install blogging software, or even figure out how to set up the advertising. At Blogger you can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes without knowing a thing about web design, and Blogger even automates setting up Google AdSense so you can make money off your blog by displaying ads and getting paid when people click on the ads. To make even more money from it, set up an affiliate program (see below) for books, music, etc., and insert your affiliate links whenever you refer to those items. You’ll have to get a lot of traffic to become a six-figure blogger, but pick an interesting topic, write well, tell all your friends, and you’re off to a good start.

Create topical resource hubs.

Are you an expert on a particular niche topic? Can you put together an overview of the topic and assemble some of the best resources on the topic from around the web? Then you can create topical hubs and get paid through sites like Squidoo, HugPages and Google Knol. Payments are based on a combination of ad revenue and affiliate fees. You’ll get higher rates doing it on your own, but these sites have a built-in supply of traffic and tools to make content creation easier.

Advertise other people’s products.

If you already have a Web site or a blog, look for vendors that offer related but non-competing products and see if they have an affiliate program. Stick to familiar products and brands - they’re easier to sell. To promote those products:

• Place simple text or graphical ads in appropriate places on your site
• Include links to purchase products you review or recommend in a blog, discussion forum or mailing list you control
• Create a dedicated sales page or Web site to promote a particular product

They all work - it just depends on how much time you have to spend on it and your level of expertise with Web design and marketing.

Microstock photography.

You don’t have to be a professional photographer to sell your photos for money. People are constantly in need of stock photography for websites, presentations, brochures and so on, and are willing to pay for the right image. People generally search for images on stock photography sites by keywords, not by photographer, so you have the same chance as anyone else of having your image picked. Just be careful that you don’t have images of trademarked brands, copyrighted art or people’s faces that are readily identifiable (unless you have a model release), but just about anything else is fair game, and I promise - you’d be amazed what people need pictures of, so don’t make any assumptions. If it’s a decent photo, upload it. Some sites to get you started include Fotolia, ShutterStock, Dreamstime and iStockphoto. The great thing about this is that it’s truly “set it and forget it”.

The above list is by no means comprehensive, but it highlights some of the new and interesting ways to make money online without investing any money, without having a product of your own, and without having expert sales and marketing skills. Most of all, unlike taking surveys or getting paid to read e-mail, the potential return on your time investment is substantial.

If you’ve been looking at getting into Affiliate Marketing but not quite sure how to get started on that website design then make sure you have a look at using Wordpress as your CMS/ design theme.

Wordpress is absolutely FREE of charge and can be installed in a few minutes if your web host has Fantastico as an option within their cPanel (ask your host if you are unsure). Also if you are looking to update the look and feel of your site you will find most updates and plugins available free of charge as well.

Wordpress is very intuitive to use and you can create highly targeted niche content sites to market affiliate products or generate adsense income.

For a step by step guide on using Wordpress go to http://umwblogs.org/wiki/index.php/A_step-by-step_guide_for_using_WordPress.

So you’ve got your affiliate website up and running…Great work! The next phase in getting your affiliate site moving is to bring visitors to your website. So how do you go about doing this? There are many steps you can take to promote your website. Some cost money other don’t. Here is a breakdown on marketing strategies to help build your website.

Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising is the easiest way to bring customers to your website immediately. The downside to this is that you obviously pay for every click that is directed to your website. If there is no money in your budget for PPC advertising I suggest trying the free alternatives below until you are more comfortable with outlaying your hard earned cash.

If PPC advertising is something you would like to try out the best form of PPC advertising is via Google Adwords. Google Adwords allows you to choose how much you would like to pay for each click that is produced. The more you pay per click the higher you are shown on the right-hand side of Google results.

Word of Mouth

Ask anyone is marketing and they will say the best for of advertising of Word-of-Mouth. Why? It’s free promotion for your product or service and you don’t do any work to get it (well almost none). Word-of-Mouth usually comes in the form of recommendations by past customers to their friends, family or collegues.

So once you have your website up and running tell everyone you know!

Forums and Advice Websites

This is another form of free promotion which works quite well if executed properly online. If the industry that your affiliate work is involved with has online forums or help websites- get involved! By saying that I don’t mean go and SPAM your website address everywhere otherwise you’ll end up coming across the wrong way.

Offer others advice on your given industry and make a genuine effort to make a contribution to help others out. The best thing about online forums is that they allow you to have a signature at the bottom of each post you write- this is where you can add your website URL. If you are contributing regualrly and giving great advice, people will visit your website but best of all your post will likely be picked up by search engines and when others look for the same advice they will be directed back to your inital forum post.