A Guide to Affiliate Marketing in Australia

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.

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.