How to Research Your Target Audience to Grow Your Affiliate Program Income

Working with affiliate programs can be a great way to monetize your blog. But to get the most from your work, you need to understand your target audience. Who they are. What they like. Why they might be interested in the products you’re promoting. And the best way for you to attract their attention. Because with the best will in the world – even with the highest marketing budget – if you’re targeting the wrong people, you are never going to make a sale.

So, in this blog, we’re going to look at how you can research the best audience for your affiliate program products.

Helping You Understand Your Audience for Your Affiliate Program Marketing

1. Find out who your potential customers are

The first place to look when trying to understand your target audience is to review the people who have already followed your links. Analytics programs – even the free ones, like Google Analytics – are a great way to find out a bit more about your audience. You can decipher all of the most important demographics – age, gender, location, even income – with absolutely minimal effort. And that provides you with the building blocks for more in-depth research.

2. Create customer profiles

A customer profile is basically a list of the key features of your intended demographic, and creating a character for each. Many businesses have multiple customer profiles and create different marketing campaigns for each, because it allows for more accurate targeting. And therefore, better results. It also helps to humanize your audience, better allowing you to understand your marketing from their perspective. For dating, you might have Divorcee David, Widowed William, Stay-at-Home Sarah, Career Karen, or Flirtatious Phil.

3. Work out why your customers might be attracted to your affiliate program products

When joining an online affiliate program, you’ll probably have looked for products and services that suit your blog niche. Something that you think that you’ll enjoy writing/vlogging about. But have you ever considered why your audience view your content? What do they like about what you do? What are they looking for? Why might they want to click your dating offers? And, importantly, what can you do for them?

4. Understand your reader’s pain points

And following directly on from the above, you need to get to know the sort of issues that your audience are facing. The sort of things that might make your affiliate network’s products appeal to them. Again, using dating traffic as an example, you might want to find out what problems your readers are experiencing that they might consider following your advice. And what might prevent them from doing so. You can do this through ‘social listening’, which is basically the process of monitoring social media channels in your area of interest. Or you can take the more direct approach of asking your readers to respond to surveys.

5. Check out the competition

Lastly, don’t forget the potential that your competitors hold. Whatever niche you’re working in, you will no doubt know of others who are doing the same. And it’s highly likely that they’ll also be working with an affiliate program.  So, pay attention to their content. Look at the people who are responding to their posts. Compare their content to yours. And see whose pages are receiving the most interaction. And if you don’t know of any direct competitors, then you can always use tools, such as Buzzsumo, to search for similar, trending content. Working with an affiliate program can be a really smart business move. It’s a simple way to get paid for doing what you’re already doing. But if you’re going to make it work, you do really need to know your audience. It takes a little time. But it always pays off in the long run.