Yesterday, I pointed out that affiliates, as well as vendors, can sell more by letting customers get to know, like and trust them (and the people who's products they promote). Today, let's talk about how to do that.

I'm reminded of of something else I wrote recently in my post about why you need to know "irrelevant" details about your target market:

The more you know about your target market, the more hints you can drop into your sales copy to remind them how you and your other customers are similar to them...

The more "irrelevant" details you know about them, the better your can relate to them.

Well, guess what. The more "irrelevant" details they know about you, the better they'll be able to relate to you too.

A post by Darren Rowse drove this point home for me today:

...in my house around three-thirty, four o'clock, things get a little bit crazy. I have a four-and-a-half-year-old boy and a two-and-half-year-old boy. And in the afternoon ... I would normally hear ... a bit of shouting, a bit of screaming. And sometimes I'd hear the footsteps racing down the hall towards my room, and I'd see the door burst open and all manner of strife would happen in my offices.

Wait a minute. Is he talking about his house or my house? The ages and child count are slightly off (I have a 7-year-old boy, 5-year-old girl and 3-year-old boy). But the story matches my experience almost exactly.

For me, it happens around 3:00 when the older two get home from school and (usually) wake the 3-year-old up from his nap. I'll bet a lot of you can relate to that too.

Darren continued:

And then I heard the door handle creak and the door slowly open. And out of the corner of my eye I saw my four-year-old son Xavier standing at the door.

Here, Darren connects a little more with every reader who has a son named Xavier...me, for example (that's my eldest's name).

I could kind of see him out of the corner of my eye and I could feel his presence there at my left shoulder, and he just stood there for 30 or 40 seconds as I continued to type. I was trying to finish a blog post before whatever happened was going to happen.

Anybody who works around young children knows what it's like to hurry out the last little bit of work before the surrounding chaos engulfs them.

And after a moment or two ... I felt him begin to breathe on my neck and on my ear.

If your kids have ever done this, you probably had a visceral reaction reading these details. And again, the connection between you and the writer got stronger.

By the time I finished reading Darren's post, I was almost ready to invite his family over for dinner. Why? Because they're exactly like us!

At least that's how it feels, because of the "irrelevant" personal details that Darren shared about himself, his family, and his experiences.

I already knew that we were both bloggers, internet marketers, etc. But those kinds of relevant similarities, it turns out, did very little to create an emotional connection.

It's the personal details that show the similarities in our life experiences -- relevant or not -- that make me feel like I know him.