Building a List of Subscribers

Today’s Marketing Monday, I address a question that keeps popping up – Should Affiliate Marketers Build a List of subscribers? When first starting out as an affiliate marketer (or anytime afterwards and still unsure), you’ll need to decide if you want to build a list of subscribers, customers, and buyers. Think about this – as an affiliate marketer, once someone visits your site and clicks on an affiliate link, if you didn’t at least capture their name and email address, most likely you will never see them again, even if they buy the offer and you make the sale. Make no mistake, the service or product where you sent that prospect surely captured them when they arrived through your link to their site and they made a purchase! And it was for their benefit – not yours!

Building your own list

If you want the opportunity to sell to the same people again and again in your niche, then building a list is essential for your online business. This gives you the ability to have continued communication with them, to share information and build a relationship with them. Not to mention offering additional new products and specials that they would be interested in.

Is building a list necessary for all niches?

Building a list works particularly well for products in specific niches. For example, the weight loss, health, and parenting niches offer opportunities for you to promote multiple products over a period of time. You’ll find a wide variety of products and services that fit different needs of your customer base. That said, just about every niche can and should be done. Remember, the idea behind building a list is to develop a communication channel with your prospects. It is one of the best ways to build an audience of customers. Otherwise, you would have to continue to generate cold traffic over and over again for every offer you promote to make sales. If you have been online for any time, you know that this is the most difficult part of affiliate marketing. When you have a list, you have the names and email addresses of potential customers so that when a new relevant products become available, you can share it quickly and easily.

Get a quality email marketing service with autoresponder

You’ll need to sign-up for a program specifically designed for email marketing – such as Aweber. With Aweber, you can create sign up forms that you can setup to put on your blog and squeeze page where people can enter their name and email address. You can also add special categories to help you get to know your customer better, such as the top weight loss problem or parenting concern they may have. Once you start capturing emails, you can use the autoresponder service to send different types of messages. You can broadcast messages to your subscribers to announce specials or to just communicate with your list. Broadcast are sent one time to your current subscribers. You can also set up a series of automatic follow up messages that are delivered at a regular time interval with information that goes out to all new subscribers. An example of a follow up email might give a tip on using a product or good informative news about the niche in general.

Final Thoughts...

Building a list doesn’t happen instantly – it’s another part of affiliate marketing that grows over time. You will start out with no one on your list and gradually begin to see it grow. But it is worth it because the larger your list, the more people you can reach to promote products. It’s also important to treat your list with care and respect so that your subscribers will want to hear what you have to share with them. Just be sure not to bombard your list with just offer after offer that will lead to being viewed by your list as spam type messages. As always, I enjoy learning what you think and questions that you might have…. so please leave a comment below and be sure to share it with your favorite social network, thanks!