Building an audience for your affiliate marketing business is probably one of the most important things you can do to ensure your success. An audience allows you to sell products and make money in the long term.

Many people get wrapped up in getting traffic to their offers, but don’t understand the importance of building their audience. An audience is different from traffic.

It’s great to get people to visit your affiliate offer, but you need to keep your audience fully engaged with your content so you can make other product recommendations in the future.

How to Build and Maintain Your Audience

An audience is coming back to your site for you.

Here’s how to grow your audience:

1. Create a solid base of content. The first step to building an audience is to drive traffic to your own site. The best way to do this is with quality, consistent content directly related to your target customer and what they are looking for. 

• Get to know your ideal market well. Get to know your audience’s burning questions, fears, problems, and obstacles. When you know this well, you can make relevant content.

2. Bring traffic back to your site. You want repeat visitors, right? The best way to get return traffic is by building your email list.

• When you have your own list, you can send an email blast and quickly get your hottest prospects back to your website or new affiliate offers.
• Ensure you offer a worthwhile incentive so your prospects are willing to give up their email address in the first place. How can you do that? Using lead magnets! For example one of my highest converting lead magnets is a PDF of 120 Networking Tips! If you want to see it, check out http://www.PowerNetworkingTips.com 

Growing Your Audience With Lead Magnets

When you give away content in exchange for an email address, you’re creating a “lead magnet.” 

Some examples of valuable lead magnets include:

1. eBooks. Write an eBook about something that they will find interesting or will help them to solve a problem they are having.
2. Webinars. Create a course that they can watch at their leisure related to something they will want to learn.
3. Videos. Create free training videos that give away a few tips and tricks. 

4. Checklists. Give away a “cheat sheet” that helps people with their burning questions or problems. I use a check list of networking tips at http://www.PowerNetworkingTips.com
5. Free Events. You can do events to bring people into your space and show them how they can benefit from the tools, services, etc you promote. You may know my signature event http://www.NetworkingRiches.com (you can join us for free) where I share a bunch of things to help business owners like you.

Get Personal With Your Content

Connecting with your audience on a personal level builds trust which builds your audience. 

If people can get a glimpse into your life, struggles, successes and failures, it helps them to feel more connected to you.

• Create a social media page or group. This creates a sense of community and when you start interacting with the group regularly, you become someone they trust. I have 2 different Facebook communities I build to get to know my audience even deeper. If you are not part of our Expand The Business (ETB) FB group come play with over 3700 business minded folks at http://www.JoinETB.com and if you are by chance a real estate Investor come join over 630 Investors (and folks who serve them) at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1046413479606105

Remember to get creative!  

This will make people want to be a part of your community and they’ll happily sign up for your emails or regularly visit your site to see what you’re up to.

Follow these steps and you'll be able to build an audience over time that you can build your affiliate business on.

Places to connect:

Expand The Business Facebook Community of over 3700 Business Minded folks https://www.facebook.com/groups/464523613590511

Our Real Estate Investor Network USA group of over 610 Investors from around the USA https://www.facebook.com/groups/1046413479606105

Home of my YouTube channel and where the Expand The Business Podcast will live: http://www.CaseyOnVideo.com