Affiliate Marketing, in its most basic sense, involves becoming an affiliate for a company and selling products on their behalf, receiving a commission for any sales that you direct. This is one of the most lucrative ways to make money online through internet marketing as you don’t need your own product, and finding an online company that is willing to let you sell their products is quite an easy process.
So let’s say for example that you find a target market that you’d like to sell ‘car tires’ to. Obviously, if you don’t have your own car tire manufacturing plant, selling car tires to people directly won’t be possible. This is where finding a car tire company will come in handy. What you’ll want to do is Google a search term such as “Car Tires” and “Affiliate”. By doing this you’ll be bringing up a number of car tire companies that have an affiliate program. This is of course an example for a more physical based product.
If you want to market a virtual product such as an ebook, then there are a number of online publishers that give out commissions as high as 75% per sale. Finding good virtual affiliate products isn’t necessarily a difficult task, and using the same method above as for finding real life products can be used. So what do you do once you have this virtual ebook that you want to market? The next step is to create a website and optimize it through a process known as ’search engine optimization’ or SEO for short. SEO involves strategies that you can use, in compliance with Google’s policies, to rank your website higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The higher your site ranks, the more people that will click on it after they do a search for your product in Google.
People vary rarely look at the 2nd or subsequent page in Google, or any other search engine for that matter, therefore if you’re not ranked on the first page under a good keyword term, then odds are that people won’t find your site. So how do find a keyword that is worth getting ranked under? You can use the Google Keyword tool located here – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Make sure you have the ‘use synonyms’ checkbox ticked. The next step is to type in the Keyword pertaining to your product. For example if your affiliate product was an ebook based on ways to make money online using the internet, then you would type the keyword ‘make money’ into the box, and select ‘get keyword ideas’ (for more details on this please check out this great affiliate marketing tutorial). You’ll see a handy chart displayed below, along with how many people on average search for that term each month. Now it may be tempting to just pick the keyword that gets the most searches each month, and attempt to rank your site under that keyword, however the more searches a keyword gets, the more competition it normally has. The trick therefore is to look for what are called ‘long tail keywords’. Long tail keywords are keywords that usually consist of at least 3 words, and that still have a reasonable number of searches. Since you’re starting out in affiliate marketing, you’ll want to pick a term that has around one thousand searches a month. You’ll notice the keyword ‘make money quick’ is searched for about 1000 times each month within Australia.
Now open up a new browser, navigate to Google.com, and type in “make money quick” (with the quotations included), and make sure to select ’search for pages in Australia’. This will show you how many sites there are in Australia that are competing for that term. You’ll notice that there’s a lot less sites competing for ‘make money quick’ as opposed to the keyword phrase ‘make money’. Since you’re starting out, build up a new website and try and get it ranked under the term ‘make money quick’. If you can do this successfully, then you can move on to more lucrative keyword phrases.
So how exactly do you go about optimizing your site and getting it ranked under your keyword phrase? This will be explained in the tutorial on Website Optimization.
If you want to become an affiliate marketer based in Australia, we recommend checking out this affiliate marketing tutorial.