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.

Just a quick note to everyone that there is a great affiliate conference coming up in Sydney on March 23rd to 25th 2010. Although the conference is predominantly focused on online gaming the cover a range of different areas including SEO, Building keywords and online promotion.

The conference is absolutely FREE to affiliates so if you’re in Sydney at the time or interested in starting out in this particular industry I would recommend registering.

Below is a little bit of an over view of the conference:

iGB DownUnder is a niche event organised by iGB Affiliate Events which focuses on the Australian, New Zealand and Asian market as well as opportunities for local affiliates outside these locations.
iGB DownUnder guarantees up to date and informative content on the Asian and Australasian iGaming markets, a new look expo, unique networking opportunities, and as always it’s FREE for affiliates to attend.

What can you expect?

·        Market Analysis – Bingo, Sports, Poker & Casino
Dedicated sessions on each sector led by top operators and affiliates, who will reveal vital information and data essential to doing business in these areas
·        SEO Panel
Discover what you really need to know about SEO from this panel of industry experts as they share their knowledge and debate the latest SEO techniques.
·        Legal Update
An update on current legal developments in the iGaming industry with specifics on the Australian, New Zealand and Asian markets
·        SEO Surgery
We will be hosting a live workshop featuring pre-submitted sites, where a panel of SEO experts will give step-by-step analysis and money can’t buy SEO tips and advice.
·        Networking Parties
iGB Events never stop at the end of the day and iGB DownUnder will be no different. Exclusive networking events will take place each and every night of the event where you can continue you do business and of course let your hair down.
·        KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Marc Phillips,
Owner of Sportbets.com.au and Bets.com.au, two of the leading affiliate websites in Australia with over 500,000 visitors a year. Marc is also the CEO of SearchForecast.com - a global online marketing firm with clients including St.George Bank, BBC, AOL, Golden Casket, Harrah’s Casino, 888, Sportingbet and EuroPartners. Need advice on your affiliate site? This is the man to give it to you.

Not Interested in Gaming? This is what you’re after!

Tactics to Maximize Affiliate Profits
Join Marc Phillips to understand the mechanical steps involved in building a high traffic sports affiliate website in an indepth. Get 1-on-1 advice, ask questions and enjoy planning on how to build search engine friendly affiliate websites, build keyword lists and create promotional campaigns designed to attract sign ups. Gain insights into which sports make the most money, how sports punters behave online and how to maximize real time information to maximize profits.

To register for this event visit the iGB Downunder website at http://www.igbdownunder.com.

There are casual affiliates, who hardly put in any efforts to promote their affiliate business; while on the other hand, there are super affiliates, who put in loads of planning and focused efforts to promote their affiliate business. Most advertisers and manufacturers are on a look out for such hardworking and smart super affiliates to work with. The super affiliates know what it takes to be highly successful with affiliate marketing. It is these unique attributes, which distinctly set them apart from the rest of their counterparts. Let us understand what it is that they have and the rest of the casual affiliates do not.

1. They work hard at understanding the e-marketing: Super affiliates make every possible smart move to use the search engine marketing (SEM) or the search engine optimisation (SEO) to their advantage. Most affiliates work very hard at their SEO and SEM with little success. The super affiliates believe more in smart work than in blind folded hard work.

1. They are clinical in their website maintenance: Every super affiliate knows that affiliate marketing is heavily dependent on the website. They therefore, give a lot of importance to their website maintenance. Unlike average affiliates, they pay attention to their website at the time of the website development as well as during the post website development stage as well. Their websites are always built with proper SEO techniques. They know the significance of usability and good user interface. Additionally, they do not get carried away by fancy but complicated website designs. They value the simplicity of the design more.

1. They know what key words are all about: Most people use just about any keywords and then flood them in the content and anywhere else they can. Super affiliates spend a lot of time in studying the right keywords for their website. They then shortlist the ones that are better suited to them. Once the keywords are finalised they are not wasted just about anywhere in the content. Successful affiliates study the behavior of the search engine robots and feed the keywords to the robots where they should. Most favored places to use keywords are the titles, title bars, first paragraph, and the last paragraph of the content.

1. They think out of the box: Super affiliates know that they need to do something different to gain attention of the world. They do not simply follow the usual guidelines of the trade but come up with innovative ideas. They also do not restrict themselves to internet marketing but also try any and every medium of digital marketing.

1. They know the importance of content: At the basic most level, the users visit the websites to read something or to get some information that they are looking for. This makes the content of the website a very important factor of a website. Super affiliates pay most attention to the content of their website.

1. They do not follow but create their followers: Super affiliates do not like to be lead but like to lead. They always come up with ideas of their own, which the rest of the world follows. They do not blindly stick to the manufacturer’s affiliate kit. They create their own landing pages and tweak the ads that they display on their website to draw greater targeted audience to their site.

Super affiliates are not made in a day. One needs to work hard and concentrate on the website maintenance on a sustained basis in order to succeed as an affiliate and become a super affiliate.

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If you are into affiliate marketing and own a website of your own, you will agree that a high rank in the search engine result pages is the unavoidable necessity for your website. This is why SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is closely related to affiliate marketing. In order to earn a good rank in the result pages, you must perform good SEO and following are some of the best practices for doing so:

1. Concentrate on the content: It is famously said that the content is king. Visitors visit your website for the content. For the search engine robots as well, the content holds a great amount of significance. If your content is copied from elsewhere on the web, the robot will not index the page or else will rank it low. On the other hand unique content will please the robot and you could earn a good rank for your website.

1. Choose your keywords well: It is the user searched keywords that the search engine scooters or robots look for in the content. If you have the right set of keywords in the content, the search engine will list your website in the list.

1. Place your keywords well: It is believed that keywords must be placed in the titles, first paragraph and the last paragraph of the content. Also, the presence of the keywords in the title bar is very handy in getting the robots to index the pages.

1. Do not spam with the keywords: Although keywords play a pivotal role in ranking, excessive use of the keywords can get the robot to doubt the legitimacy of your content. If the keywords are used too many times, the robot may treat it as spam. Not only will the page not be indexed but it can also be negatively marked.

1. More of text and less of images: Search engine robots tend to understand the text more than anything else. The robots do not understand images or animations. You must therefore have more of text than images. Also, provide some description about the image in the Meta tags. This information can help the robots understand the significance or purpose of the images.

1. Make limited use of Flash: Although Flash animations and navigation menus make your website look super cool, you must make limited use of the Flash SWF. This is because robots do not read anything that lies within the flash SWF files. Even if the Flash SWF files contain text, it is out of the reach of robots. For this, you could make use of the Meta tags to fill in the Meta data. The key is to strike the right balance between the Flash animation and the text.

1. Do the link building: The back links and the outbound links play an important role in earning a high rank. Link building is arguably one of the most popular SEO techniques.

1. Article submission is helpful: Writing articles and publishing them across the web is a great idea to boost your affiliate marketing. With each article, you could have a back link published. The readers would surely visit the published link if they like the article. The link will obviously navigate them to your website.