Affiliate Marketing: Demographics Considerations

Your affiliate marketing-fueled website, like any business, cannot survive long-term without acquiring new customers. Especially on the Internet, existing customers are great but they can and do go elsewhere, even if you're doing everything right.

Knowing where to look for new customers, then, is essential for affiliate marketing success. Here are three growing customer groups that may be worth consciously and persistently targeting:

Old People Who Want to Be Young

According to ExperienceCorps.org, the number of Americans over age 55 is projected to more than double between now and 2030, jumping up from 61 million today to 108 million then. By those measures, 32 percent of the population will be over age 55 in 2030.

If you stop to think about it, that’s an incredible figure--and, if you're involved in affiliate marketing, it's an incredible opportunity that you simply cannot ignore.

Remember that these are the Baby Boomers. They brought you the information technology revolution and they're famous for buying lots and lots of stuff. Much of this crowd is well-educated, health-conscious, and will travel any length to look and feel young.

Education affiliate marketing, health affiliate marketing, and vanity-inspired affiliate marketing offers targeted to senior citizens are going to be HUGE. You're already starting to see this with the ubiquitous "no yellow teeth" and "flat belly" age-related sells.

Don't sleep on the aging trend.

Tech-Savvy Hispanics

Don't sleep on this trend, either: America's getting browner. By 2025, it is projected that fully 20 percent of the U.S. population will be comprised of people with Hispanic ancestors. A recent research report predicts that Hispanic buying power will reach $1.3 trillion by 2013.

2013 isn't that far off.

Meanwhile, younger Hispanics are heavy users of the Internet, particularly via mobile phones and social networks. Giant corporations are starting to realize that catering to Hispanics is good business. Perhaps it's time you realized that, too.

When catering to the Hispanic demographic, make sure to go beyond mainstream assumptions about this vibrant community and gather actual facts about consumer behavior.

The Generation after Generation Y

This next demographic group may be the most difficult to market to if only because no one really knows, yet, who these kids are or what they want. "Generation Y" is the 14-24 year olds.

This group, which doesn't have a name yet, pretty much pops out of the womb with an iPhone strapped to their ear and a Facebook page full of friends. They're born into the Internet like Neo was born into the Matrix.

Many people are going to get extremely rich consciously and persistently targeting these perpetually-wired youngsters with clever affiliate marketing schemes. In our opinion, we might as well be one of those getting rich people and you might as well too. Only problem is:

Not much hard data is out there about what products these kids want, how they use the Internet to buy products, and all that sort of thing. This demographic is (literally) in its infancy.
But growing like a weed.