Meeting “Demand” and “Supply” as Affiliates

If you are still struggling to increase your income and have not yet reached your desired financial independence, it could be because you still don’t have a good website marketing strategy as an affiliate.

To become a successful entrepreneur, you need to build a proper strategy. Most importantly, you cannot copy exactly other marketers strategies…some will work while others may not. The trick is understanding your target market and its demand, then figure out what strategies to implement to turn things in your favor.

No matter whether the business is online or off, the only thing that matters in business is “Buying” and “Selling” and “Demand” and “Supply” – the basic economics an internet marketer needs to know – ‘who is the customer?’ and ‘what can you offer’ to the potential customer.

What Does The Consumer Want?

As a seller, you need to have a clear idea about what the customer is looking to buy. The way to know this is to put yourself into the shoes of the consumer and find out what ‘clicks’ with them.

Once you catch the pulse of the consumers, it’ll be easier to sell products.

Involve yourself in online consumer surveys and online forums to understand what the consumer is looking for.

As an affiliate, your marketing strategy will not only depend on the selected product but the consumer market you need to target.

What Can You Offer?

Now that you know what the consumer wants, you need to assess your offer. Find out what makes your offer better than your competition. Questions like;

-Why should the consumer buy from you?

-How do I create an irresistible offer?

-Can the customer trust you?

-How are you representing the company’s image whose product you’re offering?

A successful internet marketer needs to specifically answer such questions.

The crux – if there are millions of people buying online everyday, then whose fault is it if they are not buying from you?

The Four Phases of Internet Affiliate Marketing

Phase I – Online Research

Research is the primary factor. Before you begin to draft marketing strategies, you need to research the target market and determine your standing in the market. Online market research will include:

1. Researching competitors – their marketing strategies, popularity, market demand, weaknesses, product quality, customer feedback and online presence.
2. Researching your customers – their purchase power, product demand, online visibility, purchase considerations and their geographical location.

Create a graft sheet highlighting your findings. This preliminary in-depth research will contribute hugely to your internet marketing success.

Phase II – Data Analysis

What do you do with the data collected in phase I? You analyze it! It is not without reason that million and billion dollar companies recruit pools of data analysts. With the help of data analysis, you can break up the market and consumer demands into segments. Here are certain analytical tools you can use:

• Correlation Analysis
• Regression Analysis
• Factor Analysis
• Brand Mapping
• Cluster Analysis
• Conjoint Analysis
• Logistic Regression Analysis
• CHAID Analysis
• Multidimensional Analysis
• Structural Equation Modeling

Phase III – Development of Marketing Strategies

Strategy development involves a bit of planning too. As a marketer, you need to know about tools and methods to utilize in your marketing strategy.

Depending on the consumer data analysis, you can employ marketing methods like podcasting, blogging, SEO, PPC, video blogging, viral traffic generation, banner exchange, webinars, link building and social media networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

By ‘consumer data analysis’, one means using those web marketing tactics that the consumer also uses. Suppose the market graph of a cluster of consumers show use of video blogging to know about more products and communicating with fellow bloggers.

In this case, you, as the internet marketer, should target video blogging and utilize the medium to create a larger consumer base.

Similarly, if another cluster of consumers spend their time on Facebook pages, talking about products and discussing reviews, you have another ‘potential market’ in the making.

You can create a Facebook page of the product you sell and use promotional and advertising tools to draw in consumers. In fact, Facebook offers a very interesting tool, seldom used by new internet marketers, that is, a tool to target consumers on the basis of their geographical location.

For instance, if you want to target a market in Western Europe, then you prepare your Facebook advertisement on the same lines and the ads will be shown only on select pages of consumers from Western Europe.

Online marketing is definitely time-consuming. You need to invest in both time and money to gain momentum in consumer market.

Phase IV – Strategy Testing & Monitoring

You will never know if your strategies are working until you implement them and monitor them regularly. Of course, don’t expect miraculous results in a few hours. Monitor for weeks to see any progressive change in the consumer inflow. In between this time, your ‘efforts’ should not cease.

The strategy testing and monitoring would involve;

-Evaluating the amount of time consumers spend on your website

-Visibility of the landing page

-Keyword optimization

-Target market oriented keywords

-SEO terms customers are using to land on your website.

What Did We Learn?

There aren’t any ‘fixed’ internet marketing strategies for upcoming affiliates. Each business devises their own strategy after careful analysis of the target market and their own place in the ever expanding consumer market.

The internet is a vast universe. To make your mark in the world of internet marketing, you need to devise your own business strategy that will be different and specifically relates to your own targeted niche.

Understand the pulse of the consumer – What attracts them and what doesn’t? On what products are they willing to spend money? What are they looking for in a particular product? How can you satisfy the consumer needs?

Once you understand these questions, you can come up with your own answers, and that will be your stepping stone into affiliate internet marketing strategy development.