I have seen many ebooks teaching how to find some affiliate products and promote them to your list. They also teach you that you should create your own products that you can promote to your list.
So, in short, the formula for building your list is: find your niche, build a squeeze page, drive traffic to the squeeze page, and write an email campaign promoting either your own products or affiliate products.
And the formula for monetizing your list is: build a relationship with your list so that they trust your recommendations, and send your list to affiliate sales pages or to your own sales page.
But I want to go deeper than that. I want to think about how to really build a big list in a niche area, and how to really monetize that list, to really squeeze all available revenue out of that list.
How can you best build a big list? And I am talking conceptually here, not individual steps, as I have already covered the steps here.
Conceptually, to build a big list, you simply have to offer a superior level of content, and use the list building mechanism to screen access to your content. In order to get content from you, your visitors – anyone on the web – must subscribe to your list. And of course you have to offer the very best information online, and if you do, your list will grow fast.
Now how do you best monetize that list? You best monetize a list when you provide for your subscribers everything that they need.
For example, if you offer a dog training email list, and you only offer dog training manuals, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Think about all the things that people interested in dog training might be interested in purchasing. People interested in dog training are most generally people who own dogs. What do people who own dogs purchase or use?
They buy dog food, they buy dog toys, they buy dog equipment, they take their dog to the vet, they might even buy dog clothes or dog carriers. They might be interested in attending live dog training classes, or obedience schools.
What if you could find ways to meet ALL the needs of the dog training subscribers you have on your opt in email list? Once someone purchases your initial dog training manual, what if you have developed affiliate relationships with companies who sell dog toys or dog food, or dog clothes and dog carriers? Or better yet, you make those items available yourself. You could create a catalogue web site where you send your customers of your initial product. Instead of thinking of your $50 dog training manual as the purpose and end result of your lead building free giveaway campaign, what if you were to think of the sale of the $50 dog training manual as simply being a qualifying purchase so that you can see the person is serious about their dog and is worth promoting your other products and web sites to.
Think about veterinary services. What if you were to create a collection of veterinarians worldwide and refer your customers of your dog training manual to them? Perhaps you could even use Google Adsense for that. Create a small script that asks the customer for their city and state, and have the script automatically run an Adsense search adding ‘veterinarian’ to the state and city term, and produces a list of local (for them) veterinarians. The customer need not know you are using Google until their results come up – and then they are more than happy to click through to the veterinarian, thus creating an additional revenue stream for you.
Perhaps you could partner with companies that offer live dog obedience school or dog training classes. Arrange to make these available to your list for a commission.
Of course, this is not about dog training, this is about monetizing your list.
So what is your niche? How many additional products can be added to your offerings that will increase the percentage to which you can monetize your subscribers? How can you use a similar matching technique using google to effectively guarantee that searchers will click through the google results? What are some seminar-type products which you can team up with to earn additional revenue from your list?
What Do You Do If You Don’t Want to Put a Squeeze Page on Your Site?
First of all, I think that if you do not put a squeeze page on your site, you are leaving money on the table. I think that a squeeze page is mandatory for maximum success online. It basically allows you the ability to leverage the traffic you have coming into your web site. Instead of getting a visitor to view your web page, once, you can get them to go to the web page multiple times. This literally allows you to multiply the value of each visitor to your web site.
So even if you do not want to put a squeeze page on your site, at least add an opt in box to each of your web pages.
For this type of opt in box, one that is placed on a regular web page, you should definitely offer something for free – something that has real value. The value of your lead is high, the long term revenue of a new subscriber can be high (only you can determine that value based on a study of your list and the metrics associated with the list and its purchases).
Because of this, I would go all-out recruiting each visitor to your web site to become a subscriber. I would go with a very strong giveaway for this opt in – the giveaway must be strong enough to lure them away from the content of your web site.
If you can put a squeeze page on your main page, your main url, or index page, do so. You can get optin rates of nearly 70%, depending on the niche, on a squeeze page that has no other action associated with it, whereas you will generally be hard – pressed to achieve higher than a 10% conversion rate to the opt in email list on an opt in box on a regular, normal web page.