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.

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.

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