Whether you are an affiliate marketer or selling your own product you MUST be building a list. Your list is your biggest asset in this kind of business. There are no fliers that you can distribute in your neighborhood about new products or discounts. In the virtual world email is the way to communicate with your customers.
Say you have a review site and you are sending traffic to it. And say it converts at 2%. 98% of the traffic will come and go away forever without buying. And you either paid for this traffic or worked hard to drive it to your website with articles and SEO techniques.
But if you capture 40% of those visitors you are multiplying your chances of making a sale several magnitudes by following up with valuable content while recommending the product you are selling.
Also, your list is the source of traffic under your finger tip that no body can take from you. If you have been around in the Internet marketing world for a while you must have heard of the horror stories about Google unplugging the sources of income for tens of thousands of families by closing Adwords accounts of affiliate marketers without a warning or explanation.
And for SEO, when Google changes the algorithms all of your hard work will go down the toilet and you’ll have to start it all over after you figure out how to do it this time. Besides, some dirty competitors do reverse SEO to knock you out of your hard earned position or out of Google’s index in some cases.
So, whatever you do, make your highest priority is to capture your visitors into your mailing list, and start building a good relationship with them by sending them valuable content in each email you send to them.
That’s why money is in the list.
Even if you have a secret source of traffic that you guarantee will work for you like a clock without any interruption, imagine having 40% of your visitors every day opting in to your mailing list. If you do it right and build the healthy relationship with those visitors, you have an instant traffic machine whenever you need it.
Especially with launches, you don’t have the time to build a campaign for a launch that is due in a week or so. With your loyal list all what you need to do is to send out a series of emails and you are done.
Recently Gary Ambrose (a very respected Internet marketer who works only from home with his wife) suggested that in order to succeed with affiliate marketing you need to first have your own product. And the reason he says so is that you get to build a list of buyers in your niche who are more likely to respond to your affiliate promotions in the future.
Given that not every one can have their own products (a membership site as he suggested to be specific), a list that’s built by giving away free content is not necessarily of a lower quality than that built by selling your own product.
All what you need to start building a list my way is some quality content that you prepare by yourself, outsource, or buy it ready as a PLR or MRR; an autoresponder, and a hosting. Away from the cost of the content, the autoresponder and the hosting might cost you as low as $14.5/month. If you make $1 per subscriber every month then you only need 14 people in your list to be in profit. This is not a promise though. The more people you have in your list and the more valuable your content is the more likely you can profit from your list.
Another topic that is going to be covered in this series is how to monetize your list. Do this right and you’ll never let another day go without capturing your visitors information.
So hang around and stay tuned for the next installment of the List Building 101 series.