how to build an audience for affiliate marketing Archives

If you’re wondering how to create an audience for affiliate marketing, this one’s for you. As an affiliate you need to sell products and one of the best ways you can do this is to build an audience of raving fans! Not everyone will like you in the online world, but if you can offer value and help people with a specific problem they might have, you can sell them products and they’ll not only love you for it, but thank you when they buy!

When you can put helping people in front of the sale, you’ll be doing your customers a service. If you try and sell first, you can easily repel them instead. What happens when you enter a store and the salesperson comes up trying to make the heavy sell? You are repelled by them! The same thing happens online. People don’t want the hard sell. They have plenty of time to shop around, especially online. So by helping them by giving value, they are attracted to you instead of repelled by you! This is what’s known as attraction marketing!

How To Create An Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Law Of Reciprocity

The law of reciprocity works online very well. When you give, there’s an almost irresistible urge to return the favour. Not everyone will buy from you, but this law is an important thing to know when you’re selling online. If you’re building an audience, you want to deliver value to your people.

That way they will get to know, like and trust you. Trust is a pretty important commodity online because everyone is trying to close the deal. When you’re giving instead when everyone else is trying to get, you set yourself apart and stand out to the online marketplace.

How To Create An Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Have A Point

What’s the point of you? Really? When you’re selling an affiliate product, you need to place yourself in-between the customer and the product. To do this as an affiliate, you need to offer something of value yourself.

When you have something to offer – such as information, insight and advice, you can use it to to attract your audience and sell them affiliate products at the same time.

Once you know your point, you can start building an email list of subscribers. Here’s the practical nuts and bolts of doing this.

Building An Email List

An email list is one of the simplest ways to build an audience for affiliate marketing. There’s many ways you can build an email list, such as from a blog, a YouTube channel, or through using paid advertising.

One of the quickest ways is to send paid traffic to a landing page and collect email subscribers. Here’s an example of a landing page I built which I use to build my email list:

create an audience for affiliate marketing

A landing page lets you optimise to give you a lead cost at the lowest possible price. Whereas sending traffic to a normal website would mean you’ll lose a lot more valuable subscribers. On a website visitors can browse around and click through your content. But on a landing page, they only have two options: sign up or leave.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the “ace” up the sleeve of an affiliate marketer. On a website, people only browse for so long. After that they are gone forever. But once on your email list, you can follow up with an email marketing campaign which helps you build trust and get your subscribers to know, like and trust you.

The key being to give value to your email list first, rather than just sell, sell, sell! If you learn how to do this well, and put helping before selling, your subscribers will know and trust you because of it. Then, if appropriate, they’re more likely to buy from you when you suggest an affiliate product.

Too many affiliates just spam out links to their list. That has always turned me off and eventually I stop opening the emails. Stand out by giving value driven messages. Give value, entertain and deliver on the promise you made when your subscribers signed up to your email list in the first place.

Building A List From Blogging

This blog helps me build my email list and the list is where I make my affiliate sales. Blogging can be a great way to help you build an audience through an email list. It’s much slower than paid marketing of course, but if you enjoy a certain topic, people will be attracted to your blog posts and you’ll get a few subscribers if you offer a great giveaway on your website.

You can checkout the offers on this site and sign up to my list. You’ll probably have noticed a pop up and some banners leading you to my list. Feel free to sign up and check out my emails; you can always unsubscribe if you’ve had enough of me!

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.

using ebooks to help build an email list — Ebooks make great lead magnets and lead website visitors onto your email list.

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.