You may find also effective forum or Craigslist marketing or even postcard/direct mail marketing but in long term nothing can beat building your own email list and monetizing it with your offers.
Let´s look at some benefits of email marketing and having your own list:
- Usually we check our primary email 15-20 times a day - big possibility to get our ads read.
- Email marketing is personal - we need relationships with buyers.
- We can monetize our list over and over if people like our staff.
- Having your own email list gives you an instant traffic source.
- Email marketing is very cheap - you pay just for an autoresponder.
What all successful online marketers have in common is they have an email list of 10K+
The question about email marketing is closely related with list-building. There are many other forms of email marketing like ezine ads, solo ad services, safelists, listbuilders but as an ideal these all should serve one single goal - to build your own inhouse email list.
Even if you see a salespage of some money-making guide where is mentioned "You do not need a list" still the author of that particular product is building a list and that´s exactly what you should do too.
How to build a list?
Before you start building your list you should have your goals set up. You should be able to answer 2 questions:
1) What kind of information I will be sending to my list? This is the way you start providing the value to get your emails read over and over. It is totally your choice is your information about SEO, traffic generation, mentoring, social marketing or MLM business building, only make sure you know what you are doing - find and share only the best information.
2) How I am going to monetize my list? Quite possibly you have heard that 1 subscriber in your list equals $1 a month. This may sound easy but truth is you may have a list of 500 but still make just $25. To avoid that do not be "vague" but be very targeted. Find 1-4 topics to master and concentrate on them. Let marketers who are interested in these topics find you and give them valuable information. Be responsive to build a responsive list not just a big list.
Many affiliate marketers have found that it is not sustainable to monetize the list with single affiliate offers - sometimes you make sales, sometimes not .- and have turned to look for continuity income generators like membership site with residual monthly income. An alternative to this is a network marketing business. As a conclusion - to maximize your results of list building and email marketing always have a primary business with recurring income and in addition share your expert opinion in some Internet Marketing related topic if you work in MMO niche. This is also the reason I prefer MMO niche because the possiblity to earn recurring income is much higher than in any other niche.
Choosing Email marketing service provider.
Though you can choose an email marketing software you install on your PC for one time fee most of marketers prefer web based services with monthly fee for certain reasons - better deliverability and more flexibility.
The biggest email marketing service providers are AWeber, GetResponse and iContact and it may be totally "matter of taste" if you prefer one of them.
AWeber is the most popular, iContact and GetResponse have equal ranking. These 3 companies all have good email deliverability, one difference is GetResponse has no trial, AWeber has 30 day $1 trial and iContact has 30 day free trial.
What kind of traffic to prefer to build an email list?
There may be a dispute between "easy traffic" and "hard traffic". Easy traffic may considered as traffic from traffic exchanges, safelists and ezine solo email ads.
Hard traffic on the other hand is traffic from PPC and SE results. Still using the traffic I call "hard" has one great benefit: You are not looking for visitors but visitors are looking for you. This kind of traffic is much more responsive because you do not exchange traffic with people who already have a business but get traffic from people who are actively looking for answers. This counts both for contextual and SE traffic.
Depending on your budget you can still succeed with every kind of traffic - the key is to master it and optimize your website to the traffic source you prefer. Your final goal should be alawys be building your email list, whatever traffic source you use.
Hope you found these email marketing tips helpful!
Wish you success,
Laur
The question about email marketing is closely related with list-building. There are many other forms of email marketing like ezine ads, solo ad services, safelists, listbuilders but as an ideal these all should serve one single goal - to build your own inhouse email list.
Even if you see a salespage of some money-making guide where is mentioned "You do not need a list" still the author of that particular product is building a list and that´s exactly what you should do too.
How to build a list?
Before you start building your list you should have your goals set up. You should be able to answer 2 questions:
1) What kind of information I will be sending to my list? This is the way you start providing the value to get your emails read over and over. It is totally your choice is your information about SEO, traffic generation, mentoring, social marketing or MLM business building, only make sure you know what you are doing - find and share only the best information.
2) How I am going to monetize my list? Quite possibly you have heard that 1 subscriber in your list equals $1 a month. This may sound easy but truth is you may have a list of 500 but still make just $25. To avoid that do not be "vague" but be very targeted. Find 1-4 topics to master and concentrate on them. Let marketers who are interested in these topics find you and give them valuable information. Be responsive to build a responsive list not just a big list.
Many affiliate marketers have found that it is not sustainable to monetize the list with single affiliate offers - sometimes you make sales, sometimes not .- and have turned to look for continuity income generators like membership site with residual monthly income. An alternative to this is a network marketing business. As a conclusion - to maximize your results of list building and email marketing always have a primary business with recurring income and in addition share your expert opinion in some Internet Marketing related topic if you work in MMO niche. This is also the reason I prefer MMO niche because the possiblity to earn recurring income is much higher than in any other niche.
Choosing Email marketing service provider.
Though you can choose an email marketing software you install on your PC for one time fee most of marketers prefer web based services with monthly fee for certain reasons - better deliverability and more flexibility.
The biggest email marketing service providers are AWeber, GetResponse and iContact and it may be totally "matter of taste" if you prefer one of them.
AWeber is the most popular, iContact and GetResponse have equal ranking. These 3 companies all have good email deliverability, one difference is GetResponse has no trial, AWeber has 30 day $1 trial and iContact has 30 day free trial.
What kind of traffic to prefer to build an email list?
There may be a dispute between "easy traffic" and "hard traffic". Easy traffic may considered as traffic from traffic exchanges, safelists and ezine solo email ads.
Hard traffic on the other hand is traffic from PPC and SE results. Still using the traffic I call "hard" has one great benefit: You are not looking for visitors but visitors are looking for you. This kind of traffic is much more responsive because you do not exchange traffic with people who already have a business but get traffic from people who are actively looking for answers. This counts both for contextual and SE traffic.
Depending on your budget you can still succeed with every kind of traffic - the key is to master it and optimize your website to the traffic source you prefer. Your final goal should be alawys be building your email list, whatever traffic source you use.
Hope you found these email marketing tips helpful!
Wish you success,
Laur
