Can you do affiliate marketing with no audience? Well, most affiliates start with no audience, unless they are some sort of famous YouTube’er, or “personality”! But in the large part, affiliates start just where you are, with no kind of social influence.
To sell affiliate products online, you need customers and that means you need an audience to promote your products to. Without one, you’re dead in the water. You simply won’t sell products with no customers! But there’s some good news too. You can acquire an audience as you learn the ropes of becoming an affiliate.
You don’t need to be some kind of guru to do this. You only need to think about how you can serve your customers. There’s a few ways in which affiliates build a customer base. Here’s some of the most popular methods of gaining an audience to sell affiliate products to:
- YouTube – YouTuber’s build an audience either through creating many videos and uploading them, or running an ad campaign promoting a single video in order to build an email list
- Email marketing – is one of the best tools for an affiliate (Get an autoresponder free here). It lets you build a huge list of subscribers who you can promote products to while helping them with some problem.
- Blogging – is a cheap way to attract an audience to your affiliate products through organic website traffic. Traffic is obtained for free from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
- Social media – if you like hanging out on social media platforms, this could be for you. There’s a few social media marketing strategies including both paid and unpaid ones.
Affiliate Marketing With No Audience – Where To Start?
You may be feeling a little overwhelmed at this point wondering where to start. Think about whether you would be happier creating video, text ads, or writing content. Are you more introvert or extrovert? You can start affiliate marketing with no audience, but you’ll need to figure out a method of finding customers somehow, if you’re going to sell any products.
How you go about this will depend on a couple of things:
- Your marketing budget – are you willing to spend to acquire subscribers/customers?
- Your personality – would you prefer to create video, blogs, or interact with more people over social media?
- Your products – what kinds of products would you like to promote as an affiliate?
Getting clear on these three things will definitely serve you as an affiliate marketer. If you don’t want to spend on building up your affiliate business, you are going to need another strategy. Blogging and video creation are two of the main cheaper strategies you can use. But paid marketing is much faster. If you run a paid advert, sending targeted visitors to a landing page, you can build an email list of thousands of subscribers very quickly.
But you’ll need to figure out what offer you’re going to send visitors to. You need to find an affiliate product you can get behind and which is going to give you a profit.
Affiliate Marketing With No Audience – Products
There’s thousands of affiliate products you can promote online as an affiliate marketer. Many of them won’t pay very much either! Amazon has the lowest commission rates in the industry (from 1% for some items). So your product choice is an important decision.
If you rush in, attempting to sell just about anything, you’ll likely find some problems. Digital products tend to pay more (30%-40% typically) and then there’s subscription products and high ticket products which pay recurring commissions and the highest amounts respectively.
The most profitable digital products are those high ticket programs which also carry recurring income products within a product range.
If you’re a blogger, you’re going to need to match your product choice up with your blogging topic. Otherwise, your blog visitors won’t be a good match for your strategy for monetising. If you’re running paid marketing strategies, you’re going to need a product which is valuable enough to cover your ad spend and give you a profit when you make a sale.
Get An Audience Fast Through Building An Email List
One of the best, fastest and simplest ways to build an audience for affiliate marketing is through running a paid campaign and sending people to a landing page. Collect their email address and build a large list of subscribers. Hey presto – you have an audience!
Learn how to do this with a step by step course here.
The email list is one of the best and most cost effective ways to build an affiliate business. However, you need to understand a few things before you build an email list:
- What products are you going to sell your subscribers?
- Who is your audience? You’ll need to know this when placing your ads. (See customer avatar worksheet pdf)
- What benefit/s do they have in joining your list (your lead magnet)
- What information are you going to offer them in your email marketing campaign?
- How much can you make per subscriber?
With a low valued offering, you’re obviously going to make less per subscriber than with a high ticket sales funnel, for example. So make sure you’re aware of this when you start running your ads. Advertising online can get expensive so you need to be aware of your potential return on investment before you start!
