Building Your First List

Blogging for Pleasure AND Profit

For many bloggers, their blog is a way of expressing their passion for their subject, attracting and interacting with like-minded enthusiasts.  And that’s the way it should be.  First and foremost the blog is a communication tool – usually expressing personal opinion and often inviting comment.  Blogs should be an interactive two-way street.  What better way to explore and enjoy your interest than by dialogue and an exchange of ideas with people who share your passion?

The key to a good blog is good content.  Unique and relevant content is appreciated by both the search engine spiders and the human reader.  Content is still king but it needs to be interesting, informative, current, practical and useful – and if you can throw amusing and entertaining into the mix, you’ve got it made as a successful blogger.   If visitors are impressed by your blog, word will spread amongst your fellow enthusiasts and your traffic will grow.  Personal recommendation is always the best promotion and people take notice.

Once your blog is attracting some serious traffic you’ll be in the fortunate position where you can start thinking about making some money from your blog – if you’re not doing so already.  A popular blog with its associated volumes of targeted traffic becomes an attractive proposition for advertisers who will pay good money for an opportunity to get a slice of the action.  A blog is also an excellent way of building a list of eager subscribers to help build your trust and credibility.

Some bloggers who start their blogs for the pure pleasure and satisfaction of communication about their passion may have qualms about making a profit out of their passion and feel they may be exploiting their visitors.  However, if you’re recognized as an expert and authority in your field and people are flocking to you for advice and recommendations, surely you’re providing a valuable service, and as long you’re true to yourself and your values, why shouldn’t you benefit.   That way you can devote more time to your blog and provide even better value and content for your visitors.  A win/win situation!

Affiliate Marketing – How to Choose the Best Market for Building Your List

Once you’ve decided on affiliate marketing as your online business model, it’s time to make some decisions about what sort of products you’re going to be promoting.  At the broadest level you’ll need to choose a market area, product or products within that area and a suitable domain name which ties it all together.

Some affiliate marketers make their money by having multiple streams of income coming from relatively small niches in a wide range of different markets.  This does have the advantage of not having all your eggs in one basket when it comes to a possible downturn in the popularity of some markets, but it does make it quite hard work in terms of keeping on top of trends and products in all your different areas.  In this case you will need to be building and running completely separate lists for each of your marketing areas of interest.

Luckily, there is a way to simplify things – and it’s always good to simplify things, at least when you’re starting off in a new venture.  Instead of looking for a load of tiny niches to exploit, you need to look for larger target audiences and offer them multiple, highly related offers.  That way you’ve only got to deal with and keep abreast of developments in one main area of interest – and if that area of interest is a personal passion of yours, then you’re laughing (hopefully all the way to the bank!)

The big question in undertaking any sort of marketing venture is what to promote.  There are three main areas you need to consider to help you make this decision.  Firstly, you need a market which is accustomed to spending money, preferably a lot of money, on their passion or interest.  For example, golfers are well known for having money to spend – not least because this tends to be a sport largely enjoyed by well-to-do enthusiasts.  It’s not a cheap game to practise even at a very basic level.

You need a target audience which can be presented with a variety of offers.  You want a market where you can put together a selection of offers which are all related to the general area of interest of your target audience.  This way you can make the best use of list and provide a comprehensive range of targeted offers to your subscribers.

If you can find a market which meets the above two criteria and is also an area where you have a strong interest yourself, then that’s the target audience you should be concentrating on.  Having a personal interest in the market area is not totally necessary but it will certainly make your life easier and more enjoyable if it’s there.

Affiliate Marketing – Build A List First

When first becoming involved with affiliate marketing, a lot of budding entrepreneurs simply promote their favorite offer by advertising their affiliate link and sending visitors directly to the sales letter on the vendor’s website.  If you’re lucky, you may get a few quick sales this way, but it’s not the best strategy.  Using this practice, for all your promotional efforts, it’s not you who gets the greatest benefits.  If the visitor doesn’t buy, that prospect is lost to you forever.  On the other hand if the owner of the product you are promoting is any sort of marketer at all, they will have an opt-in list of some kind for visitors to join and whether or not the visitor buys on that occasion, they will get the opportunity to promote to that subscriber over and over again.  Not just their own products but other people’s products as well.  You may get the credit for a delayed buyer who comes through your link and the necessary cookies are in place, but you will get no credit for any of the other offers that the owner of the initial product chooses to  promote to his subscribers.   You need to be able to grab these visitors’ contact details yourself.

An average sales letter will get around 2% conversion on first viewing.  This means that you are losing 98 out of every 100 people you send to the site.  These visitors are lost to you but if they join the list on the vendor’s site he’ll be able to contact them in the future with a variety of offers.  A great deal of your work and effort is therefore being spent to grow the list of the product owner .  Not a good marketing strategy!

Hopefully you’re now persuaded that you need to build your own list.  You might think this is more effort than you want to commit, but when you think about the alternative, you really have no choice if you’re serious about making any money online with affiliate marketing or indeed any other sort of marketing.

The easiest, quickest and most basic way to set up a list is using a squeeze page, the sole purpose of which is to capture a name and email address.  However, a much better way is to set up a list at your blog.  If your blog is set up correctly from an SEO point of view, you will get the added benefit of organic traffic sent from search engines when people search on your keywords.  This is traffic which won’t come naturally to your squeeze page, however good it is.

Whichever avenue you choose, you will then be able to promote your list instead of your affiliate link.  Your primary objective should be to build your own list, not somebody else’s.  You can set up your opt-in list to redirect the new subscriber to a thank you page which includes your affiliate link.  This way you get them on your list but you still get them to the affiliate product salespage.