Most new affiliates will start affiliate marketing with no audience. But without any customers you’re not going to sell any affiliate products! One of the first things to learn as an affiliate therefore is how to find customers by placing your marketing message in front of an audience.
It would be great if you started with a massive following. Many YouTube’er, for example, have tens of thousands of followers. If they uploaded a video recommending a product, they could easily start making sales pretty quickly. But for most this isn’t the case. So if you’re starting from scratch without any clue about how to find customers for your products, here’s a few ideas.
Affiliate Marketing With No Audience
To sell affiliate products online can be a tricky thing. But it’s all the more tricky if you haven’t defined your target audience. Target audience in affiliate marketing is pretty important if you want to be successful. You literally have millions of people you can show your products to with all the tools at your disposal as an affiliate. But 99.9% of them won’t be the least bit interested if you’re offering! You need to find the 0.1% who are! The small slice of the market who are interested in your affiliate products is your target audience. By understanding this concept you will have placed yourself apart from many affiliates who will struggle.
To understand your target audience will take you massively forwards and it will save you a load of headaches! How do you define your target audience? Depending on your products, your “perfect” customer will have certain interests and hobbies. So if you’re promoting a Yoga product, for example, you might find them looking at online health and fitness content. As you get clearer on who is likely to be most interested in what you have to offer, you can “zone” on on certain marketing techniques to help them solve their problems – with your product. See also the customer avatar worksheet pdf to help you define your particular type of customer.
Affiliate Marketing With No Audience: Finding Customers
Initially it can take some time to find customers for your affiliate products, particularly if you have no existing audience. But that’s common for new affiliates and everyone has to start from somewhere. Many affiliates will run paid advertising to attract an audience and you can get traffic (visitors) very quickly with the paid route. Others might create content through blogging or video. There’s also several methods of marketing on social media platforms, both paid and unpaid social media marketing exist.
One of the best ways to build an audience is through list building and most affiliates will have an email list of some kind. An email list gives you an audience very quickly, depending on how you build it up of course. Paid marketing is the fastest way to build an email list and you can do this by sending targeted visitors to a landing page and collecting email addresses.
Here’s an example of a landing page:
From a landing page, affiliates build an audience of subscribers. With a large enough list, they can sell products and services on complete autopilot, if they get their targeting right and have a good offer to sell.
Blogging To Find An Audience
One popular method of building an audience for affiliates is blogging. Blogging isn’t as fast or as scalable as paid marketing, but it’s cheap and you can blog from anywhere. It can however take months to build an audience through blogging, but once you have established a lot of content, your audience can find you through multiple blog posts you have written.
Depending on your niche, there may be more or less competition. In a very competitive niche it will take longer to establish website traffic as a blogger. Ideally choose a topic which you’re interested and passionate about. When you’re interested in your topic, you can sustain your efforts for much longer and this will give you more opportunity for success.
Marketing Is Key
Joining an affiliate program and getting your affiliate link is the easiest part of doing affiliate marketing. What is more difficult is building an audience and building trust and respect with them. When your audience gets to know, like and trust you, they will be much more likely to buy from you. When you build an audience of raving fans, you’ll be in a good position to make sales!
To get good at marketing should be the main focus for affiliates. Without marketing they won’t sell products and they won’t make any money. As a beginner, this can be a frustrating time. When your email list is only small, you won’t get massive results and you’re a beginner. But as your experience grows and your audience grows, you should find it becomes easier to make sales online.
Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing here.