Are you wondering how to build an audience for affiliate marketing? Building an audience to promote affiliate products can be done in a few different ways. But the key to getting your messages in front of as big an audience as possible is to build a list of email subscribers.

Once you have an email list, and a strategy for growing that list, (and communicating with your subscribers), you can take your affiliate business forwards in leaps and bounds. Until you do so, you’re forever stuck either paying for traffic or building content in the hope someone will find your content and purchase a product from it.

But most people don’t purchase affiliate products from a website. On a website, someone only has a few minutes before they are gone forever. In that small window of opportunity, they are unlikely to buy from a link or banner on your website. They came to your website to find something out or read some content. They didn’t (necessarily) come to buy a product. So, they are usually gone in under 10 minutes.

How To Build An Audience For Affiliate Marketing

But get their email address and things change. Once someone enters their email into a form on your website, you can extend this time period dramatically. With an email list, time spent on a website can be extended to days, weeks and even months, years and decades. You can build a relationship with your audience and most importantly build trust.

It can take some time to do this however. Your email messages need to be congruent with the intent which your subscribers had when they opted in. You need to provide value and genuinely offer to educate, inspire and entertain your subscribers. If each email you send out has a link saying “buy this”, it’s pretty uninspiring. That’s not going to help build your audience and build trust.

You may sell products but you won’t build trust. Arguably trust and building long term relationships is worth far more than selling the odd product. If your audience trusts you, they’ll buy products from you and keep buying (if you’re trust-worthy!).

It can of course take a little time to get used to writing to your email list. Provide value as your priority and you’ll build confidence in your audience. There’s one or two emails in my inbox which I never open! That’s because I know they are from someone who is trying to sell to me and I’ve decided that their tactics are untrustworthy!

In particular I hate the “time is running out” theme and other scarcity tactics of that ilk! Everyone is different though and of course these strategies obviously work, otherwise, marketers wouldn’t use them.

The emails I do open are those from people who talk naturally in their emails, as if I were their friend.

How To Build An Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Building Your List

Building an email list can take some time and, in particular, it’s difficult at first when nothing much happens! A lot of activity can amount to not much in the way of traffic when you first get started. But, if you stick at it, over the longer term you’ll start to see some traction.

You can build a list very quickly if you use a landing page and paid advertising. If you’re a blogger, or using free marketing strategies, expect it to take much longer. See get traffic to your website free.

One of my favourite strategies has been creating ebooks and offering them up as list building tools. See ebook lead magnet. An ebook is a great tool for building your audience for affiliate marketing from a blog.

At first, with less than 1000 subscribers, your uptake of affiliate products will likely be fairly low. At this point, it’s easy to become disheartened with your affiliate business. But stick at it and you’ll start to see some sales coming in if you contact your email list regularly and offer useful insights to help your subscribers.

Over time, the people who opted into your list early on should get to know, like and trust you. So you should see more sales coming in from longer term subscribers as you get better at building your email list.

Keep the long term strategy in mind when writing your emails too. Short term thinking can put people off opening your emails. Think about your subscribers as you would a friend. Offer up a few valuable emails before asking for the sale. If every email has a link to purchase something, your subscribers will soon get the measure of you, and stop opening your emails!

Blogging To Build Traffic

Once you have a lead magnet such as an ebook, you can create more content around your ebook to draw traffic from the search engines (and other platforms). This is a slow strategy but over time your efforts compound and you’ll start seeing a steady increase in your daily leads if you keep at it long enough. A good strategy to do this is discussed in my ebook “Niche Blogging For Profit“.

Basically this strategy involves finding long tail keywords which relate to your ebook in some way. Use Google’s keyword planner to find them and write content around your keywords. Then, promote your content through social media sharing and link building. Over time, some of your content will attract free traffic from the search engines and you’ll get some leads who find your ebook and sign up to your list.

See also how to sell ebooks on your own website. It takes a bit of time to create an ebook, but in truth, not much longer than writing a good quality article. Plus you can outsource the ebook cover using Fiverr.com and easily convert a document to pdf using free online tools such as freepdfconvert.com.

Summary

So, how to build an audience for affiliate marketing? Building an audience for affiliate marketing can take some time depending on how you go about it. The fastest way is to use a paid marketing strategy and offer a valuable giveaway on a landing page which is specifically designed to capture emails. On a website, there’s far more choice, so less people will sign up. With a landing page, there’s only two options: sign up or leave.

With paid marketing you can scale up your traffic too. Which can build a list very quickly with enough budget. But you also need the right affiliate products and strategy on the “back-end” in order for your enterprise to be profitable.

Once on your list you should build confidence with your subscribers by offering value. Educate, inspire and entertain your audience and build trust for the long term. Don’t just spam your list with products because you’ll lose trust and people will stop opening your emails!

For every product you promote, you should be sending out a few value packed emails first. Otherwise, your audience will quickly lose faith and trust in you. Then, you won’t see any opens, let alone sales!

If you’re serious about taking your affiliate business to the next level, access a free video series by clicking the link below. You’ll meet one of my personal mentors Stuart and you can access a community of online business owners and affiliates.