O`Bannon's Leap

Blogs - The Underused Asset of Affiliate Marketers

I’ve been involved in a discussion recently about researching methods for getting into the minds of potential customers.

All of the “usual suspects” were thrown out: talk to family and friends, participate in forums for your niche, monitor news vines for stories related to your niche, use surveys and so on…

But the one thing nobody mentioned until I finally put it out there, was personal blogs.

These are a gold mine for information on just about any market you could come up with, and best of all they’re absolutely free to read and available 24/7 for you.

And personally, I’ve found in many markets they’re the absolute best source for real information about your potential customers, far better than forums or surveys.

Here’s why, lets say you’re a man about to launch a new women’s shoes site. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a man owning a women’s shoes site, however it may be a little difficult for him to fully understand what really motivates his customer purchases. It’s not always about the “best deal”, or even the “latest trends”. There can be a matrix of complex triggers and motivators beneath a customer’s purchasing decisions, and without understanding those you can’t effectively market to them.

That’s where personal blogs step in as a treasure chest of wealth for the marketer. Unlike a forum or survey, where people might be a little guarded in what they say, or may skew their responses to “fit in” with the crowd (happens all the time), on a personal blog people tend to be more personal, candid and free with sharing their inner thoughts.

Sally Doe may post on her blog about the latest set of heels she just bought, explaining why she “just had to have them”, and without even realizing it give a smart marketer more valuable data on her purchasing motivations than he could have ever collected from hanging out in forums.

And if he finds similar motivations mentioned or implied after researching several other blogs, he can create a strategy to test for marketing to those motivations on his web site.

So, while researching blogs can be a time-consuming process, it can also be the best source of real information you’re likely to find online about your target market in some cases. It’s definitely worth the efforts.

Technorati Tags: blogs, niche research

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