The Guide To Affiliate Market Research.

17 Keys To Figuring Out What Your Audience Wants

To have a thriving affiliate business, you need to start by doing your market research to figure out which market you should be targeting, what your audience is interested in, and what they want to buy. Check out these 17 keys for gathering these valuable insights…

 

1. Find Out What They Are Already Buying

Let’s suppose you already know your market, and now you need to determine what this audience wants. While there are plenty of research steps you can take to figure this out (which we’ll cover in this guide), the #1 step determines what your audience is ALREADY buying.

Put, if you know what your audience is already buying, then all you need to do is put that offer in front of them. And since many affiliate platforms give you insight into what products people are buying, this is easier than ever for you.

This brings us to the next point…

 

2. Research These Four Marketplaces

When you are doing both your overall market research (to pick a niche) and your product research, you’ll want to search marketplaces to see what people are buying. Here are four places to start your search:

 Amazon.com
 ClickBank.com
 Udemy.com
 JVZoo.com

Look for bestsellers and products with a healthy amount of competition, both of which point to potentially profitable products and niches.

Next…

 

3. Check ClickBank Gravity

ClickBank has an extensive affiliate marketplace where you can do your market research and find products to promote. As you’re doing your research, you’ll see that ClickBank has a data point called “gravity.”

The gravity is a measure of how many different affiliates have made sales of the product in the last 12 weeks, with more recent sales being heavier. Thus, a high gravity number means a lot of different affiliates are making sales.

On the one hand, you want a somewhat high gravity number as it shows you the product is selling well for many people. On the other hand, you don’t want to pick the product with the highest gravity, as then you’ll likely find yourself competing with too many other affiliates. Pick something with a relatively mid-high rating (as compared to similar products).

 

4. Use Google

There are two good ways to use Google for market research:

1. Uncover general market demographics and data. For example, you can search for your niche keywords followed by a search term such as “demographics.” For example, bodybuilding demographics. Just be sure to focus on legitimate, reputable sources of information (such as peer-reviewed journals or reputable research organizations).

2. Check what your competitors are doing. Search for your niche keywords, and then take note of how many competitors there are (more competitors means it’s a healthy market) and what sort of products they’re selling.
   This brings us to the next point…

 

5. Look For Evidences Of Popularity

As you’re researching marketplaces and doing keywords searches in Google, you’ll want to look for the following evidence that tells you a market or a product is popular:

1. Look for multiple products on the same topic.
2. Look for bestselling products.
3. Look for evidence that marketers are paying to advertise a specific type of product.
4. Look for “buzz” on blogs, forums, groups, social media, and other communities.

Next…

 

6. Use a Keyword Tool

A keyword tool (like the classic Jaaxu.com or similar) can help you determine how popular a topic is or what people in your niche want. Just enter your niche keywords, and pay particular attention to “commerce” related keywords (e.g., “buy ______” or “free shipping _________” or “PayPal _________”).

 

 

7. Check Google Trends

Your average keyword tools can give you insight into how popular a particular topic is, just based on how many searches it receives in a month. However, in most cases, this snapshot is just that – a shot. It tells you what kind of searches people in your niche are conducting right now.

To figure out if a particular topic is evergreen, you need to use Google Insights at https://trends.google.com/trends/.

This particular keyword tool gives you the current snapshot of searches and gives you historical data. You can look at data captured in the last few hours to the previous 15 years or so. This is a great way to determine if a particular topic has an enduring interest in your market (e.g., is it evergreen?).

 

8. Gather Audience Demographics

It’s important to know what your audience is buying and know every other little thing you can think about them. This includes age, gender, location, income, hopes, fears, education level, marital status, whether they have kids, and so on.

Simply put, the more you know about your audience, the easier it is for you to create content that resonates with them and send offers that they want. To that end, you can research Google for your audience demographics as mentioned earlier, plus you can also survey your audience…

 

9. Survey Your Audience

There are multiple ways to gather valuable insights using both formal surveys and informal surveying techniques. These include:

 Distribute a proper survey to random people in your audience.
 Conduct a small focus group to gather information.
 Post questions in informal settings, such as on your blog or social media.
 Ask questions via email and ask people to answer via email.

Keep in mind that if you ask questions in public areas (such as on a social media page), peoples’ answers will be influenced by the other solutions they see. This can skew results, but it can also tap into the power of brainstorming and get people thinking about ideas they may not have come up with independently.

 

10. Ask The Right Questions

 

If you survey your audience, you’ll want to ask questions such as this:

 Hold old are you?
 What is your gender?
 What is your education level?
 What is your marital status?
 What is your annual income?
 How much do you spend in the niche?
 What products have you purchased to [solve some problem]?
 What did you like about these products?
 What did you dislike about these products?
 Why didn’t these products solve your problem?
 What features and benefits do you want [in a specific type of product]?
 What sort of products would you buy if they were offered?
 What are your biggest problems [in the niche]?

Keep in mind that what people say and what they do are often two different things, so use surveying to gather insights into how people THINK (rather than predict what people will do).

 

11. Look At Advertising

If you want to know if a market is famous or if a particular product is popular, follow the money. In other words, see if marketers are spending money to advertise on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter ads, on niche websites, in niche newsletters, in offline publications, and similar. If business owners continue to invest money in ads OVER TIME, that’s a good clue that the market as a whole and the particular product are profitable.

 

12. Check the Newsstand

Offline publications spend a lot of money and time researching to see what will help them sell their magazines. That’s why looking at your local newsstand (or just looking at magazines online, even on Amazon) will help you determine what’s popular.

If you’re still doing general market research, check if there is an offline publication devoted to your market.

Once you start doing more focused research in a particular niche, pay close attention to the cover articles (as these are the topics that sell the magazine). You’ll also want to thumb through the publications to see what businesses are paying to advertise.

 

13. Look Elsewhere Offline

Even though you’re primarily selling affiliate offers online, doing some research offline will help you confirm whether a market is viable. Ask yourselves these questions:

 Are there offline stores and other businesses dedicated to this market?
 Do people have “meet-ups” in this market?
 Can you find expos, tradeshows, and similar events in this market?
Let’s take an easy example. If you were researching a dog-related niche, you’d be able to tick off all three of the boxes above. Namely:
 There are dog supply stores, veterinarians, groomers, and other business owners catering to dog markets.
 People on meetup.com get together with their dogs.                                                                                 You can find plenty of dog events, from expos to dog shows to agility competitions and more.

When you tick off all the offline boxes, it’s a good bet that the market is profitable and evergreen.

 

14. Consider Your Resources

Once you decide on a specific market, you need to ask yourself this question: can you REACH this market using standard advertising methods, both free and paid?

If you say “no” to this question, then cross that market off your list and pursue something else. If a call is difficult to reach, you’re likely to find it expensive to advertise or simply an unprofitable market to target.

 

15. Narrow Down Your Niche

To succeed in a market, you need to focus on a smaller subset of the overall market.

For example, trying to compete in the more significant weight loss market is next to impossible. However, if you target a smaller niche, then you can dominate it. You might focus on types of diets (e.g., low-carb dieting) or different types of dieters (women trying to lose baby weight) or some combination (women trying to lose the baby weight with low-carb dieting). The more focused your niche, the more your content and offers will resonate with your intended audience (and the more money you’ll make in your affiliate business).

 

16. Choose Evergreen Over Trendy

When it comes to picking a niche, you should choose an evergreen niche. This is a market that’s popular today, it was popular a year ago, and it will be famous for the foreseeable future.

For example, weight loss is a classic evergreen market, as it’s unlikely that people will lose interest in it any time soon.

However, while your niche itself should be evergreen, and MOST of the offers you promote should also be evergreen, you can encourage trendy products (fads) from time to time too. Just be sure to promote modern products through channels such as your live email broadcasts. In other words, don’t upload them to evergreen media such as your autoresponder.

 

17. Test Different Offers

As you’ve seen throughout this guide, there are plenty of ways to determine what your audience wants. But there is only one way to know for sure what your audience is going to buy. And that method is to test different offers to see what your audience responds to the best.

For example, if you’ve set up a mailing list, you can send an identical email (or series of emails) to your list, except the emails promote different products. Most of the larger email service providers give you the tools to create and run these sorts of tests so you can easily split your list into random groups and then see what your list responds to.

Email is just one example. You can also test and track ads on your blog, on social media, via paid advertising, and all the other ways you promote offers. Once you know what your audience is buying, then focus on selling those particular offers.

 

Conclusion

Executing Affiliate Market Research in advance will significantly increase your profits. As you can see, there are plenty of steps to take when researching markets as a whole or researching specific products to see what’s selling. Don’t skip these steps, as choosing a profitable market and putting in-demand offers in front of this market is the key to your success as an affiliate marketer!

 

Be sure also to read our article on:

Increasing Affiliate Income

The Guide To Selecting Profitable Products

The Guide To Affiliate Optimization

 

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