I attended a small affiliate marketing meeting a week ago, and found it very enlightening. The guy who organized this is working his way to become one of those "internet marketing gurus" who sell ebooks teaching people how to get rich on the Internet.
But since he wasn't charging anything to attend this meeting, I figure there's no harm in going.
The one thing he said to me that made this meeting worth attending, is that there are products that people buy for leisure purposes, and products people buy because they need them.
That's probably a no-brainer to most of us, but somehow, he was able to express this in a way that really lit a lightbulb in my head. It made me see things in a new way.
One of the websites I publish is "CousinConnect". It's a database of queries. In the genealogy world, a "query" is a request for help. It's like posting a classified ad in the newspaper searching for someone who shares a distant family connection to you in hopes that person can provide some clues to your family's history. All we did is move that concept to the Internet where such queries can be searched and indexed.
The important part of this is that our demographic has a specific need. They need to find other people related to them. And if you've ever spent some serious time researching your family's history, you'll understand how small tidbits of information can be like gold to a genealogist. In other words, genealogists end up getting a sense of urgency to find such information.
So, I've identified the fact that CousinConnect's primary demographic is there because they have an urgent need. Not just a "need", but an urgent need. That's why they come to CousinConnect.
However, all this time I haven't played into this need when it came to monetizing my traffic. Instead of leveraging this need, I simply showed them other links of interest. What I need to do is rethink the design of CousinConnect, and somehow weave some affiliate marketing links into design. That is, make monetization part of the overall CousinConnect structure.
I haven't figured out how to do that yet. When I figure it out, I'll tell you about it here.
But since he wasn't charging anything to attend this meeting, I figure there's no harm in going.
The one thing he said to me that made this meeting worth attending, is that there are products that people buy for leisure purposes, and products people buy because they need them.
That's probably a no-brainer to most of us, but somehow, he was able to express this in a way that really lit a lightbulb in my head. It made me see things in a new way.
One of the websites I publish is "CousinConnect". It's a database of queries. In the genealogy world, a "query" is a request for help. It's like posting a classified ad in the newspaper searching for someone who shares a distant family connection to you in hopes that person can provide some clues to your family's history. All we did is move that concept to the Internet where such queries can be searched and indexed.
The important part of this is that our demographic has a specific need. They need to find other people related to them. And if you've ever spent some serious time researching your family's history, you'll understand how small tidbits of information can be like gold to a genealogist. In other words, genealogists end up getting a sense of urgency to find such information.
So, I've identified the fact that CousinConnect's primary demographic is there because they have an urgent need. Not just a "need", but an urgent need. That's why they come to CousinConnect.
However, all this time I haven't played into this need when it came to monetizing my traffic. Instead of leveraging this need, I simply showed them other links of interest. What I need to do is rethink the design of CousinConnect, and somehow weave some affiliate marketing links into design. That is, make monetization part of the overall CousinConnect structure.
I haven't figured out how to do that yet. When I figure it out, I'll tell you about it here.
