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.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a very good way of driving traffic to your site within a short period. Google Adwords in my opinion is the best PPC platform around although you may also like to try out Overture which runs the Yahoo and Live Search Engines.

With PPC advertising the cost is determined by your budget. You can set your daily spend as high or low as you wish and you can also choose the maximum price you would like to pay for each click.

To get started with Google Adwords you will need to setup an account with Google. This will require you to enter a Credit Card with a $10 setup fee applicable to your new account.

Once your account has been setup you will need to setup your advertising campaign. One of the most important things you need to do is keyword research!

Choose your keywords carefully as you don’t want to be paying for customers not necessarily looking for your products. Google offers a brilliant tool to help out with keyword demand here.

Once your keywords have been selected check on all of them over the next few days, then weekly just to see how each is performing and then make any changes you see fit (remove keywords, add, increase CPC etc).

The other important thing you need to be cafeful with is your Advertisement and its keywords and wording. If you create an advertisement that doesn’t include keywords or is not relevent to the page you are redirecting your website to, Google may see the advertisement as low quality and penalise you on your “Quality Score“.

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.