An Affiliate’s Guide to Building a Blog Audience
Zero Parallel works with a vast network of Affiliates, all of whom have different levels of experience. Regardless of your experience, the beauty of blogging and online marketing in general is that there’s always more to learn.
The fact is that traffic rarely drives itself. Consistency is key in the leads generation industry. If you want to drive consistent traffic with your blog, you’re going to need a captive audience. In this article, we’ll teach you exactly what you need to do to create a high-converting audience for your blog.
Affiliate Tips: Create Gated Content
Gated content is simply any content that requires some sort of trade in order for people to access it. A popular form of gated content are e-books. Bloggers oftentimes create e-books, podcasts, webinars, and other highly valuable content in exchange for their visitors’ emails. Gated content works best when the content you’re marketing is irresistible. It has to be able to market itself. Some examples of irresistible content include:
- A free guide on how to accomplish something in __ days
- A podcast series on how to do something better
- A free e-book on how to tackle a difficult task in an easy way
- Anything with the words “Ultimate” or “Free” in it
- That’s truly all it takes to gain at least 100 new email subscriptions. The reason why emails are so valuable is because they are your captive audience. Consider the people who sign up for your content as warm leads. With a few nurturing emails, they might just convert!
Affiliate Tips: Add Influencers to Your List
Influencers generally don’t cost as much as paid search marketing (they can even be free if you have connections!), but they have the potential to pull in an incredible amount of traffic. To find the right influencers, you have to know your target audience. Are they male, female, young, old, employed, or unemployed? Once you figure out your main target audience, find public figures or websites that appeal to your targeted group. Create a spreadsheet of your potential influencers based on their:
- Title/Name
- Niche
- Website/Platform URL
- Assigned Content
After you’ve compiled about 50-100 names (based on your current traffic), reach out to each of these influencers every time you write a new article. The trick is to split them up into groups so that you won’t overwhelm your list of influencers. When you email these influencers, include an incentive to have them promote your article. The incentive can be mutual web traffic, valuable content for their readers, or even giveaway prizes. Be sure to follow up with the influencers that do respond so you can refer to them again for future article promotions.
Affiliate Tips: Conduct Interviews
Interviews are great for ‘borrowing traffic’ because the person whom you’ve interviewed will most likely share the blog post on their various social platforms. The bigger their audience is, the most profitable their interview will be. To reach out to potential interviewees, write a personal email addressing exactly why you’re inspired by their work and why would like to interview them.
The rule of thumb is to keep the email as straightforward as possible. The more verbiage you include, the more intimidating and burdensome the interview might seem. So, send out concise and convincing emails to your potential interviewees, and follow up with specific due dates and publication dates should they respond positively. Remember to encourage your interviewees to promote the interview on their various platforms!
Affiliate Tips: Post in Facebook Groups (or on social media in general)
Facebook groups are incredible hubs for target marketing. Not only are your targeted audiences pre-gathered into specific niches, but most Facebook groups even encourage you to share third-party content (such as your own blog articles). Twitter and Instagram also operate similarly, with the #hashtag to mark specific niches. Find these groups and interact with its members. Don’t just drop links all the time, but truly create relationships with your potential followers. These are fantastic outlets for nurturing your leads until they convert.
Affiliate Tips: Use Content Syndication Networks
People don’t use these networks nearly as enough as they should because content syndication networks are great marketing tools to create more exposure for your blog. Think of these websites as the PRNewswire for your articles:
Similar to syndication networks are blog communities and services. These blog hubs allow you to submit your blog articles and get voted for more exposure:
If you apply these valuable insights regularly, you will definitely reel in new followers. We’re so confident in these tips that we’re willing to guarantee that they will work.
For more helpful tips, sign up with us as an Affiliate and join our growing network!
