Affiliate Program Tip: Know Your Traffic’s Demographics

If you think that you can get money for displaying advertisements, just any kind of advertisements, you’re right. However, you can’t get BIG MONEY out of that method. You have to choose well what kind of affiliate program to advertise on your site. Keeping ads contextual is one great way to make sure that you monetize your site while offering something of value to your visitors.

So how do you make sure you get to choose the best affiliate program? One is to learn more about your visitors’ demographics.

If you have a gadget blog that caters mainly to women, it’s safe to say that you have to look for affiliate programs that are offering gizmos for women or any techie product that women will appreciate. But what if you have a pretty general site and you don’t know what type of visitor it usually attracts? There is a wide variety of ways that can help you profile your traffic:

a. Run surveys if you have a quite responsive traffic. If your visitors often leave comments, running a survey to know about your readers’ needs can help greatly in deciding what affiliate program to offer them. If you are looking for a free tool for setting up surveys, you may try SurveyMonkey.

b. Use Google Analytics in learning about the geographical location of your visitors. The map overlay under the “visitors” section of your Google Analytics account will show you where most of your site’s visitors come from. If you have a niche site, which are usually successful with affiliate programs, knowing where your visitors come from can help you look for affiliate programs offering local products or services.

c. Demographics Analysis and Prediction Tools

MSN AdLab has a tool for publishers to predict the demographics of a site’s visitors or people searching keywords. Key in the URL of your site and you will be shown an estimate of the gender of your site’s visitors and age bracket.

Quantcast is also offering a similar tool with more detailed description of a site’s visitors. However, it will only show information about your site’s traffic if you already have a considerable amount of traffic, say more than 5000 unique visitors per month.

It a well-known fact that you can’t get make money from affiliate programs if you don’t have a good amount of traffic on your site. So to make the most out this tip, you have to make sure your site gets to achieve great traffic first.

For more concrete example of how one can get the most out of analyzing statistics can benefit a site, check out the Make Money Online Blog of the Week’s Kumiko’s CashQuest about the Harnessing the Power of Statistics for Blogging Success.