Think surveys can’t help you make big money as an affiliate?  Think again!  Putting a customer questionnaire in place and segmenting your list effectively can turn your affiliate marketing into a whole new–and much more profitable–game.

To make it clear how this works, let’s use an example.  Let’s suppose you’re an affiliate for an online marketer who is about to launch a coaching program and who has some cool, free blog software he’s giving away, prior to the launch.

You want to promote the software, and the program, so you might do something like this:

• You send a message out to your list, saying that you know some of them already have blogs. But for the customers who don’t, they should really get this cool, free software to get a blog going.
• You’ll follow that up later with a message telling them about the coaching program and urging the newer marketers to join.

Pretty standard affiliate marketing model, right?  You blast the message out to your list and hope the people for whom it’s relevant will read it and respond.

But let’s suppose you  had “insider information” that let you ramp your marketing up dramatically.

Let’s suppose you could look inside a magic box and know exactly who on your list didn’t have a blog yet, who really WANTED to put a blog in place.  This “inside information” let you distinguish the newer marketers from the “old hands.”

Well, if THAT were the case, your strategy for promoting the product could be very different–and far more effective.  That strategy would look something like this:

• You send a special message out to the newer folks on your list, the ones who don’t have a blog yet.
• You tell them that you know they’re just getting started and they don’t have a blog up yet and you know how tough that is–you’ve been there, yourself.
• You tell them that you really want to help them out, even though putting up blogs isn’t the focus of YOUR business, so you’re going to hook them up with a guy who has some great, free blog software.
• You tell them about the software and encourage them to take advantage of it.
• Then, a few days later, you follow that up with a message telling them about the coaching program, that will help them get their new blogs going and get their businesses up and running.

Now, can you imagine how much more effective this second strategy would be?

• You’re talking DIRECTLY to the folks who NEED the product you’re promoting, rather than sending a “generic” message to your list.

• You’re telling that you know their problem, understand their pain–because you do.  You took the time and trouble to find out who they are and what they need.

How can you do this?  How do you get a “magic box” with all this insider information?

It’s not magic at all.

• All you have to do is survey your list, to find out who they are, what they want, what they need.
• You use that information to segment your list.
• Top marketers do this all them time–that’s WHY they’re top marketers.  One top “guru” segments his list 36 different ways!
• Follow their lead, do what they do, and research shows that your conversion rates can go up by as much as 45%.

So get our questionnaire templates, which will let you get the information YOU need to segment your list, quickly and easily.

For the last two days, I’ve had the privilege of attending the Paid for Life conference in San Diego.  Mike Koenigs and his partners organized the event to benefit the Just Like My Child Foundation, which Mike’s wife, Vivian Glyck, heads.

The content has been amazing; I’ve literally watched people transform their thinking and their businesses, as they benefited from the wisdom of such speakers as Eben Pagan, Russell Brunson, John Assaraf, and Brendon Burchard.

But what Vivian and Mike do with the Just Like My Child Foundation is much more amazing than anything that’s come from the stage this weekend.  If you ever doubted that miracles exist, one look at the “social proof” Vivian offers, as she documents the life-saving and life-changing work they do in Uganda, will dispel those doubts.

I had the privilege of speaking at last year’s Paid for Life Event and I heard Vivian describe the journey that took her to Africa, to begin the wonderful work that has transformed her life and the lives of so many, many children.  At that event, Vivian talked about having their son, Zak, and how that event transformed her life.

She talked about their struggle to have more children and their inability to make it happen.  I related to her story because my husband Jack and I went through our own infertility struggle to have our daughter, Elizabeth.  (We like to joke that Elizabeth cost more than our first house, before she was even born . . ..  )

The kind of pain that comes when you want so desperately to have a child is deep and it’s wide and it’s abiding.   But Vivian and Mike took that pain and turned it into a miracle.

She and Mike already had one miracle, their son Zak.  He’s amazing—beautiful blond curls, captivating smile, and an incredibly sweet nature.

But Vivian managed to create another miracle, when she followed the urge to fly to Africa and start this wonderful work.   Through that work, she has transformed the lives of more than 50,000 children—she’s given them health, she’s provided an education for them, she’s given their families hope.

And hope transforms lives, because it empowers people.   Pearl S. Buck once wrote that to eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.  Mike and Vivian have given the children of Unganda bread but they’ve given them so much more—with education, with microenterprise, with the foundations of a thriving community, they planted the seeds of hope.

That is a powerful and remarkable gift.  To bring hope to the lives of so many people who were living in such desperate circumstances is truly a miracle.

And online marketing is an integral part of that miracle.  Mike’s online marketing business allowed Mike and Vivian the freedom to pursue their dream and create these miracles.

This weekend, other marketers contributed to that miracle as they donated their time and talents to the cause, spending their own funds to travel to the event and donating the proceeds of their sales to the cause:  Eben Pagan raised enough money on the stage today to build two schools.

I read somewhere miracles are natural:  when they do not occur, something has gone wrong.

And I think that points to the message that Mike, Vivian, and Paid for Life can teach us all.  If  we’re not making miracles in our life or the lives or others, then we need to follow their example, learn their lessons, and make it happen.

“Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”  These kinds of phrases have been thrown around for years by people who weren’t really impressed by what survey researchers and statisticians had to offer.  But as our economy changes, the “data geeks” may well have the last laugh, because they’re about to become the new rock stars.

IBM, for example, is about to move from a staff of 200 data analysts to a staff of 4,000 analysts–no, it’s not a typo, they’re going to multiply the staff by 20.

As a recent post on Salon notes,   “the ability to extract stories from a world of increasing and abundant data will be increasingly critical to many industries. Indeed, the opening of U.S. federal government data at data.gov (and the appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee to similarly open the UK’s data archives) implies a new societal and cultural importance for data wranglers.”

So, does this mean you have to go out and take courses in statistics to keep making money?  Not at all.  But you DO need to get some basic skills and make sure that you’re staying abreast of current trends.  As we’ve told you before, now more than ever, you’ve got to have an ongoing stream of information about your customers and your market and you’ve got to know how to put that information to work for your business.

New data tell us that in the last quarter, 43% of Internet users visited social networking sites–that’s nearly 1 in 2!

Nearly 50% of women and more than 37% of men went to social networking sites.  And the age data are among the most interesting:  While it might not surprise us that more than 70% of under-35 Internet users ventured into these sites, it’s more surprising that more than 43% of  Internet users between the ages of 35 and 54 ventured into social networking sites and nearly 19%–close to 1 in 5–of users over the age of 55 did so.

When we consider that much of the growth in the labor force is expected to come in the over-55 age group, the increasing use of social networking sites by older Internet users becomes even more important for online marketers.

These data, which come from the Consumer Internet Barometer, underscore the growing importance of these sites and remind us all that marketers simply cannot afford to ignore them.

And, as an aside, the Consumer Internet Barometer is a great source of data on online trends!