A Guide to Affiliate Marketing in Australia

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.