The best product to sell is the one you already know your audience wants. The most successful affiliate marketers not only know what their audience wants, but they can also accurately predict what will go over well with them. It took them time to get there though, and you can get there too with patience, research, and some effort.
The best plan is to get a feel for your audience before you even start marketing to them. A common thread amongst struggling affiliates is that they do not know their audience. Below are some prompts to help you learn yours and become a better marketer.
* What is your customer avatar?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, we have some work to do. Here are a few questions to get you started. When targeting your niche, whom are you speaking to? How old is your reader? Are they married or single? What does their average day look like? Where do they work, and how much do they make there?
This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to questions to help you get a clear picture of your target market. Your content looks very different when it’s written for a 20-something hotshot programmer at a startup versus a middle-aged parent of teenagers.Â
The answers to these questions build your customer avatar, and you could have a couple of different ones. Best practices are to actually put a name and picture together for each avatar you have.
Once you have an avatar you can tailor your message accordingly. Content written for Sarah, a middle-aged mother of two who runs her real-estate business from her home while her husband manages a local factory looks and feels very different from content written for Ted, a young bartender who shops for boyfriends from his clientele while spending each weekend skiing the slopes. Start small, and let your avatar(s) grow as you get to know your audience better.
* Where can you find them?
This is different than the avatar aspect. You need to know where to advertise to your market, either paid or free. This could be Facebook groups, Discord servers, the local library, or even at a nearby sporting event. Go there and find out what they need. This allows you to tailor content that fills their needs.
Find your audience, and you’ll also find out where there are opportunities to get in front of them with your content. This means paid traffic and natural alike will be easier to generate.
* What does your audience struggle with?
 When you spend time where your audience is you basically get free market research. They’ll have discussions on their needs and wants. They’ll even identify weaknesses in the market – missing solutions that you could help provide for them.
You use this knowledge to create quality content that points to real solutions for their problems. This builds you a loyal audience that trusts you. Ultimately this audience leads to sales.
* What products solve those problems?
Knowing your audience and their problems puts you in the perfect position. As an affiliate marketer, your job is to link people to products that solve their problems. Promote products that are popular and proven to solve the problems your audience has while avoiding the stinkers that are going to let them down.
* What else do they need?
This is what separates good affiliate marketers from great ones. Knowing your market and the problems that have is good. Providing them with solutions is better. Knowing what else they’d be interested in even if they aren’t asking for it is next level.
Don’t you think a group of people who wanted products to help their camping experience go smoothly might also be interested in information on campgrounds? Maybe they’d like to learn about RVs or need information on vehicles capable of supporting their lifestyle.
Make some content that doesn’t solve an existing problem, but supports an adjacent solution and see how it goes. If it goes well, make more and provide solutions. If not, pivot to something else until one does.
These prompts are a great place to start, but they aren’t the end. The skills you build following them will propel your content creation game. You can become a leader in your niche and as a result, have a great audience eager to buy from you.
Are you struggling to figure out who your customer is? I’ve done customer avatar workshops with many people in the past and would be happy to help you too.