There’s a lot of science involved in affiliate marketing and this translates into predicting the things which are (falsely) accepted as unpredictable about your visitors and your buyers.

In a nutshell, my post is about keeping up with the Paris Fashion Week of affiliate marketing, it’s the butterfly effect theory of selling online.

I do a lot of research. I don’t know exactly why, but curiosity motivates me a lot. Perhaps because of my young age, my schooling or simply my character.

I found some great online market research reports on Pewinternet.Org and I wrote the most relevant things down. Here they are:

• Most internet users start at a search engine when looking for health information online.
• When it comes to looking for information about exercise, fitness and vaccinations, 80% of adult Internet users, or almost half of Americans over the age of 18 (about 93 million), say they have researched at least one of those specific health topics at some point. 30% of email users have sent or received health-related email. Women, better-educated, and more experienced Internet users are more likely to search for health information and exchange health-related email.
• Just half of adults with chronic conditions use the internet; but once online, they are avid consumers of health information.
• One in four Americans (26%) has used the internet to look for information about prescription drugs. Just 4% of Americans have ever purchased prescription drugs on the internet.
• Fully 58% of those who found the internet to be crucial or important during a loved one’s recent health crisis say the single most important source of information was something they found online.

Other interesting data I found, came from The Bureau of Labor Statistics. I’m sure this will have a huge impact on the way we promote and market our affiliate products. They report that households headed by people 55 to 64 increased their total spending at almost twice the rate of all households (60% vs 32%) in the most recent five-year survey period.

The US population is getting old, and it’s predicted that in the next five years this will add more than 1 million consumers per year to the 65+ age segment. Now, these customers tend to look for long term benefits, guarantees and safety. You need to give your best in your website’s design, accessibility and your content needs to be flawless because elderly minds are hard to change.

Ofcourse, there’s a lot of valuable information you can benefit by doing your own little thing when it comes to market research. There are so many tools available to help you this. To name a few, Google Analytics, Google Trends, Youtube Insight and others.

You can use Google Analytics to discover things like customer country, revisits, time on site. With Google Trends you can predict traffic increases or declines. Let’s take, for example, the trend for “aloe vera”. Looks pretty constant, there are no major rises or declines in traffic during different periods of previous years. Ofcourse, you can’t expect your summer campaigns to work in winter, but you get the idea.

Youtube also has a useful tool which I recently discovered. Youtube Insight shows, among other things, a gender diagram and age percentage of the users who watch your videos. On your left are my stats for a channel where I uploaded 5 aloe vera related videos. This kind of information shed a lot of light on the kind of prospects I’m targeting with my videos. It made me discover my ideal customer.

In my research, I found a recent post on Remarkable Communication which made me visualize how my ideal customer looks like and how to find him/her.

If you have something to sell to that demographic, you need to be thinking about Cynthia (who hates to be called Cindy), who’s 33 and a little bored at work, has a four-year-old named Ben and a six-year-old named Ruby, reads Parenting even though it makes her feel guilty and her mom got her a subscription to Redbook but all she reads are the dessert recipes and articles about dieting, and yes she knows that makes no sense but she does it anyway, and yeah she has a MasterCard, because she got mad at the bank that issued her Visa so she cut it up.

That’s a great example of how specific you need to be about your customers. Ofcourse, there are other types of customers showing up on your pages, not only ideal ones, but don’t bother too much with trying to keep them happy because you risk upsetting your ideal ones. Keep your content focused and remember the age-old saying: “You can’t make everybody happy!”

Get out of your shell and start reading news, blogs, statistics, watching trends and subscribing to feeds!

P.S.: For more similar information, be sure to check Craig’s latest post here on the blog, called Geotargeting and SEO.