A Guide to Affiliate Marketing in Australia

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.

If you have been trying to find out ways of making money online, then you must definitely have come across the term ‘Adsense’. This is perhaps one of the most talked about terms on the web. Before we discuss how you could make money with Adsense, let us understand what Adsense actually is all about.

Adsense is a money making program created by Google. There are numerous webmasters fighting to find a place in the Google search pages. All of them strive to find a higher rank in the result pages. It is obviously a tedious task and the positive outcome is not guaranteed. Google, therefore, came up with another program for the webmasters called the ‘pay per click’ (PPC) program or the Google Adwords. With this program, the interested webmasters can have their website links placed in the Google search pages at a desired rank. There is a separate section for these sponsored links on the search pages. The webmasters will obviously have to pay good amount of money to Google for this service. Depending on the desired rank, Google charges the webmasters for each click on these links. This is, however, only half of the entire story about Google Adsense.

It is obviously not possible for Google to place all these sponsored links on the search pages as the number of sponsored links are very huge in number. Google therefore, publishes many of these links on its networked websites. This is where Adsense comes into play. You, as a website owner, can register with Google and have your website listed in the networked sites of Google. Once your website is part of the Google advertising network, Google will send you a set of links that you will need to add to the HTML pages of your website. Once done, your website will immediately display the Google Ads.

Every visitor of your website who clicks on any of these sponsored links will earn you a commission. As soon as a visitor clicks on the sponsored link, Google charges the link owner some amount of money. Google will then pay you some amount of money as commission. The amount of money you get paid is never revealed and is random. You may get paid as much as $0.2 to $0.8 per click.

You will have to apply for Adsense with Google. You will need to provide some of your details and the URL of your website. Only if your website gets selected can you get started with the Adsense program. Some of the points that you must keep in mind to ensure that your website gets selected are listed below:

1. Your website must contain unique and original content. Websites with plagiarized and duplicate content are never selected.
2. There must be no broken links in the content as well as in the web address.
3. The website should have a good number of quality, one-way, back links and a healthy count of out bound links. However, the inbound links count must obviously be pretty much higher that the outbound links from your website.
4. The average flow of traffic is important. More the flow of traffic, more are the chances of your selection for Adsense.
5. Your website must abide by the policies listed by Google. The policies are available at their site.

Google Adsense is undoubtedly the best money making program on the web today. You will need to be strategic in your approach and will need to make sure that you abide by the Google policies.

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.