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.

“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.

The news was big enough to make NYT and WSJ alert status:  After much sturm, drang, and hoopla, Microsoft and Yahoo finally struck a deal to challenge Google on search.

Will they successfully challenge Google?  Is the Microsoft/Yahoo deal game-changing?

I suggest that, if you’re an online marketer, you shouldn’t be wasting time worrying about those questions.  The most important question you should have been asking yourself when you heard the news was, “how can I use this new development effectively in my business?”

Lots of marketers understood that and quickly put up blog posts to start a conversation with their customers about the news.

And you can bet your bottom dollar they did more than that:  They got busy figuring out how to profit from this news.

Whether they’re figuring how to make more money from their PPC campaigns or how they might roll out products that teach others to do so, smart marketers weren’t reacting, they were taking action.

Because that’s what smart marketers do:  That’s how they make money.

And you know what?  The smart marketers weren’t sitting there wondering whether this news was relevant for their customers or what  to buy, they knew.

Because smart marketers have that information in their hands, constantly.  They’re getting an oingoing stream of information about who their customers are, what those customers are buying, and how they like.

So when big news breaks, they don’t have to waste time–and competitive advantage–trying to figure those things out.  They’re armed and ready with the information they need to take action and make money, right away.

Bottom line, that’s why you need a survey system in your business:  So when news breaks, you know exactly how to take action to profit from it.

Many of you have asked us,

How do I use surveys to find out what my customers want to buy?  Can I really use surveys to CREATE a PRODUCT?

Absolutely!

Top marketers use product creation surveys all the time to get an absolute road map for creating products their customers will buy.  That’s their secret to hitting it out of the park with top-selling products, over and over again.

The problem is that lots of people don’t know how to write a survey that will give them that road map.

In our new product, “Turn Surveys Into Cash,” we’ve created a template that you can modify, quickly and easy, to create a product in your business.

Let me explain how the process works:

You describe the product in a survey question, in 2-3 sentences.

• Phrase it in terms of your trying to create value for the customer.

Then, say to the customer “If this [name of product or site] cost $x, how interested would you be?  Very interested, somewhat interested, or not interested at all?”

Everyone who says they’re “not interested at all” gets a second question, asking if they’re interested in the product at a LOWER price point:

• “OK, how about if the [name of product or site] cost [$lower price point].  How interested would you be?”  (same set of response options)

• To do that, you create a “skip pattern,” so that the folks who said they were “very interested” or “somewhat interested skip this question and go on to the next one.   (Skip patterns are easy to create–we teach you how to program them.)

It’s not a perfect science, but if you get 30-40% or so who say they’re at least somewhat interested in at least one price point, you should figure that it bodes well.

Why?  Because people tend to understate interest in thee sorts of surveys.

• Plus, you haven’t really had a chance to demonstrate the value of the product or site–so if you get decent interest without that, you’ve probably got pretty good support for the product or site.

In our new product, we give you even more information on how to find out what your customers want and how they want it delivered, so you can boost your profits by creating products your customers will buy, quickly and easily.

New data support what we’ve told you before: Personalizing your messages to customers increases the chance those messages will actually get through.

A new survey shows that 41% of US Internet users pay more attention to personalized advertising, 39% say they’re more likely to click on personalized ads.

But here’s the kicker: Privacy concerns about online targeting are growing. A 2008 Harris poll showed that 45% of Internet users are nervous about website policies that provide the information for ad targeting, 57% of respondents in another survey said they’re concerned about advertisers using their browsing history to choose ads.

What’s the answer? Get the data a different way: Use surveys.

Bottom line, knowing who your customers are is as important as understanding where they came from and how they found your site.

And, as we’ve pointed out before, using survey data on your customers to segment your list can up your click-through and conversion rates by as much as 45%.