If you want?to be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to build up a good mailing?list. If you don?t have an email list, then you are throwing away money.? A mailing list offers you an easy way to stay?in touch with interested customers and potential customers, keeping them?informed about your products and increasing the chances of them coming back to?your site to make a purchase.
If you don?t?have a list, it?s much harder to bring visitors back to your site, and you will?be forced to rely on other (potentially expensive) forms of marketing just to?keep your traffic at its current level, let alone bring in new visitors.? Fortunately, modern list management tools?make it easy to stay in touch with your customers.
The Basics of List Building
To build your?mailing list, all you need is a good autoresponder service. Popular third party?services include Fluttermail, GetResponse and Aweber.? If you have the technical skills to run your?own list, you could try Infinite Responder, an open source mailing application
that has a lot of useful features including scheduled mailing, newsletter style?mail bursts, and easy to configure bounce handling.
Once you?ve?decided what you want to use to send your email messages, you need to get?people to sign up to your list.? If you?simply add an opt-in form to your website, you might get a couple of signups,?but it will take a long time for your list to get big enough for you to?effectively monetize it.? Consider?running a competition, or offering a free ebook download as an incentive to get?people to join your list.
The Importance of Opt-In
It is vital that you require people to opt in to your list.?Do not add people to your list without obtaining their consent first of
all.? Sending unsolicited emails is against the law in many parts of the world, and even in areas where the law?permits the sending of unsolicited emails, you could be breaching the terms of?service of your hosting agreement.? Do you really want to risk losing your domain name and hosting because you wanted?to cheat and make your mailing list subscriber figures look better?
By using an opt-in mailing list, and making it easy for people to opt out or suspend their?subscription if they are going on holiday for a while, you keep your customers?happy, and promote your business as an honest and reputable one.
What to Do With Your List
Once you have a list, you need to make it work for you.?Send out regular emails (but don?t overload people?s inboxes by sending
multiple mails per day!), with useful tips, interesting articles, and perhaps?even the occasional freebie or money off voucher.
Don?t make every email a sales pitch.? Give out free?information, and make at least half of your emails entertaining or informative.? When you want to promote a product, start by adding some gentle pre-sells to your regular newsletter, and then send out a hard sell email. The pre-sells should have got your subscribers thinking about your product, and they?ll be more receptive to your final sales
pitch.
Be consistent with your newsletter. If you think you?ll struggle to write a newsletter every?week, spend a day or two preparing a large batch of emails, and schedule them?so that you don?t have to worry about doing any more writing for a few months.
Once you have a good list of subscribers prepared, you?ll wonder how your site survived in?your pre-list days!?
This guest post was written by the team at Twist Digital ? please?visit their affiliate directory??or join in the discussions at?the affiliate forum?.?
