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.

Affiliate marketing is an excellent choice to make money online. We discuss the ten most important points in this article that are important to help you be successful with your affiliate marketing.

1. Your own website is imperative: You must have your own website to get started with your affiliate marketing. Although you can start with a blog or use a free domain, it is always better to have your own website. With your own website, you can be sure of things. You can control anything and everything you want. This is not always the case with blog sites, and other free websites, wherein, your blog or pages may get deleted without your knowledge.
   
2. Choose your niche: You can choose to earn from pay per click program, pay per sale, or par per lead. Each of these programs has its own merits and demerits. You must invest time in understanding them and then finalise the one that suits you the most.
   
3. Choose good merchants: It is important that you work for the reliable and well paying merchants. There are many merchants out there, who may not pay you at all or pay you as per the commitment. It is therefore very important to research on the good merchants.
   
4. Excellent website content is important: You need visitors on your website and good content is what attracts them. Avoid duplicate or copied content. This will only hurt your affiliate marketing.
   
5. Links are important: If you can increase the number of inbound and outbound links, you will notice a drastic increase in the number of people visiting your website. Inbound links are the ones that navigate from some other website into your website and out bound links are the ones that navigate out of your website to some other website. These links would earn you a good rank in the search engine search pages ad and hence get more traffic into your website.
   
6. Filter the links: You must also ensure that you do not have links coming from bad reputed websites and also no link going to bad named websites. This will not only put off the search engines but also the visitors. Try and earn a good image for your website.
   
7. More of text and less of rest: Although images and animations add charm to your website, you must not flood your website with the images. This will not only annoy the visitors but also earn you a low rank in the search pages. Basically, the search engine scooters or robots do not understand the images and hence rank your website lower.
   
8. Good keywords are helpful: You must use good keywords in the content. The keywords must match the ones that are most searched by the users on the search engines.
   
9. Set benchmarks: You must visualise your progress every week and then set new benchmark. Unless you visualise your progress, you will never know how well you are doing and what are the areas of improvement.
   
10. Make wise comparisons: You must compare your earnings with the other website owners, preferably your friends. This will give you an idea about your progress and the quality of your merchants.

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.

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.