Affiliate Marketing is getting tougher with so many people getting in to this industry. The demand in this industry is increasing while the supply is not that high. Lot of affiliate networks are shutting down and the commission rates are decreasing. Still, there are affiliates who continue to make money by promoting products. Smart thinking and genuine marketing will always take you far ahead in a longer run. One of the methods that I have been using is building an email list and making money from that list. In this post, I’ll explain how I promote products to a list. Using this method, I need not care about my site rankings or any changes that search engines make to their algorithms.

Selecting a Product

Building a list of potential customers and then selling to those customers requires some skill. I usually select a product which will bring my customers back to me. A good example would be electronic cigarettes. Electronic Cigarettes has a good potential in the market and I know that people will come back to me to buy different flavors, accessories and refills for their cigarettes. This means I am making money with them initially when the main product is sold and then I keep making money from them when they buy different products related to the main product. Thus, selecting a product like this helps in making money in a long-term.

Selecting an Affiliate Program

I usually prefer choosing a product that has its affiliate program listed in a reputed network. This gives me some assurance that the product owner (merchant) is reputable and will pay me on time and every time. Secondly, in this case, I will look for a merchant who will pay me commissions on recurring sales as well. This means I make money when someone buys an electronic cigarette from my affiliate link and then purchases refills and other accessories.

Getting Traffic

My best traffic sources for such a product has always been Facebook and Plenty of Fish. The good thing about these networks is that we can target people by age, sex and in case of POF we can also target people who are smokers. The traffic from these networks is good and targeted. You can try other networks but these are the ones that are working for me as of now.

Building a List

Traffic is sent to a landing or a squeeze page. I usually create a landing page using WordPress, Headway Theme or Affiliate Theme. The most important thing to do while building an email list is to give away something. Lot of marketers expect people to enter their name and email without giving anything to them. This does not work all the time. I always include a freebie on my landing page and my traffic needs to enter their name and email address to get that freebie. In this case, I will giveaway a free ebook to people which will explain them on how electronic cigarettes can help them quit smoking and have a healthier life. Such books can be purchased online with full resell rights. The optin box design and the entire list building process is done by AWeber.

Marketing To The Email List

Once a person is added to the list, He receives the free e-book and agrees to receive information from us. The beauty of AWeber is that now we can send emails to these people and promote products to them. These auto emails are sent using the broadcast feature in AWeber. These broadcasts are sent from your personal email address and you just need to create one email per broadcast and set it on AWeber. I usually send my broadcast two days after I have got a lead. Later, I send five emails in the next five weeks. These emails are personally written by me and go through my email ID.  Most of these emails will have promotions and offers relevant to my main product. Also, whenever there is a new offer, I can send an email to everyone in the list.

Thus, having a list is like an ATM. Just send an offer or product info to everyone in the list and see the money come in. AWeber is a brilliant tool to manage an email list and they also have a $1 Trial to try out their service.

Have you built a list and marketed to that list? Do share your success and failures with list building and affiliate marketing.