The importance of building a mailing list isn’t new but it is still a part of affiliate marketing that is often neglected.

If your focus is the internet marketing niche itself, you probably already have a fair sized list and are used to promoting offers and products from other vendors weekly or even daily.  It is a powerful asset when used wisely.  I know I wish I started earlier doing it.

What I have been doing for a while now is collecting the email addresses of visitors to my niche sites…and it is now really starting to pay off.

I was pretty much forced into taking action on building my first niche mailing list.  I had a page that was getting 100+ unique views per day but for some reason they just weren’t clicking my AdSense ads…I had a great page but it was pretty much worthless.  They would read my article and then disappear.

The subject of the page wasn’t suitable to have a product listed so Amazon was out of the picture.  I couldn’t find any relevant products on Clickbank so no-point going there.  The only that I could think of was to remove the information off the site and make them opt-in to a mailing list to receive it.

I kept reading about the importance of list building on all of the internet marketing sites but never gave it a chance – it seemed too hard!

I turned my article into a series of emails to drip feed them the information over a few weeks.  I modified the page so it became a squeeze page.  I was very careful to keep the content SEO friendly without damaging the potential for converting the traffic.  With the off-site SEO up to scratch the reworking of the landing page didn’t affect my position in the SERPs.

Traffic continued to flood in and I now manage to get 25% of the visitors onto my mailing list.  (You can obviously improve on this conversion rate with more testing and better copy).

After each person has gone through the auto responder series they should now (hopefully!) trust what I have to say and look forward to the next message…this is where you can make some great money from your list.

Like many affiliate marketers, I am constantly adding new content to my sites and this usually centers on a product review or a comparison feature article.  I base what I write on my keyword research but it still takes time to get traffic from Google.  With my fancy new mailing list, I just have to send out a broadcast (or add a new follow-up to the auto responder series) and I instantly get a flow of traffic from people who already like what I say.  I write content for my list based on the medium to short term potential of organic traffic.

If you write quality honest reviews or provide regular helpful tips and insight, your mailing list will listen to what you have to say.  You should be able to make some sales write off the bat each time you create new content for your site.

Now you don’t have to rely on Google to provide the traffic…you have a loyal army of targeted followers ready to buy.

This becomes extremely handy nowadays, with Google shifting rankings around like crazy.  If you drop from the SERPs you at least have a backup in place – and the backup gets bigger and bigger every day.

If you want to give email marketing a go then I personally use Aweber.com for my mailing list manager. There are others available but I can’t vouch for how good they are as I am happy with Aweber.