Build Your Email List, Not Somebody Else's

by Andre Kalis

I have the impression that many, if not the majority, of affiliate marketers think that because they promote other people's products and programs, they don't need to build their own business, brand and alas, their own list of email subscribers.

Many marketers may disagree with me, but I regard the above as one of the most fatal business building mistakes of affiliate marketers and one of the main reasons why the vast majority fail at internet marketing.

Online marketing success does not mean you have to have your own products to market, but it does require establishing your credibility, your own brand as a marketer, sending people to your own blog, website and also your own opt-in pages. By doing this you will establish trust, people will get to know about you and on that basis also trust your recommendations and product offers, irrespective of whether the products you market are your own or another person's.

For this reason. instead of sending people to replicated affiliate websites, promote your own blog, website and opt-in pages first, giving people the opportunity to subscribe to your blog or sign-up to your email list. Once you have people on your own list of targeted subscribers, your chances of securing sales are infinitely greater, while a visitor to a replicated sales page not belonging to you is lost to you forever, especially if that visitor did not make a purchase from the sales letter. And we all know that the conversion rate of first time visitors to a sales page is absolutely negligible.

When you offer a quality product for free on your squeeze page or opt-in page in return for people to sign up to your email list, you have a dramatically better chance of conversion, an ongoing opportunity to email your list members and ample opportunity to recommend your affiliate products to them.

I really have such a bee in my bonnet about the fruitless and wasted practice of directly promoting other people's sales pages and the disastrous implications thereof for affiliate marketers, that I have written about it a lot and keep on alerting my fellow affiliate marketers about it. It is misguided practice for which product owners must accept blame. They want you and an army of affiliates send people to their sales pages without concern for your business and your success.

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About Andre Kalis

182 connections, 2 recommendations, 465 honor points.
Joined APSense since, September 19th, 2010, From Cape Town, South Africa.

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Comments

Gilberto Cintron

Viral, Local, Social & Mobile Marketing Expert
You are so right. This is a very good post and every affiliate marketer should read it. To begin building a massive list, I invite everyone that reads this to become a contributor at the Apsense Countdown, http://apsense-countdown.com
Nov 2nd 2010 06:47

Luigi Cesareo

Manager
Purtroppo avete perfettamente ragione
Nov 2nd 2010 06:53

Sean North

Business
Excellent post Andre, you have hit the nail on the head, without developing your own brand and relationships you don't have a business.
Nov 2nd 2010 06:58

Paula van Dun

Retired
A very good article. That is also why I like apsense, I can promote ME. The only thing that i find difficult is to find a good and responsive give-away to get people to opt-in. There are tons of e-books and other free stuff. I guess most people already have downloaded a lot of e-books.
Nov 2nd 2010 07:08

Hitesh Sangani

Internet Marketer
Yes I agree with you 100% but people don't have th money for autoresponders etc.
Nov 2nd 2010 07:48

Paula van Dun

Retired
If you can not afford an auto responder you can use a mailto link + autoreply
Nov 2nd 2010 07:53

Gilberto Cintron

Viral, Local, Social & Mobile Marketing Expert
I have a gift for you, it is a free autoresponder for wordpress. If you have a wordpress blog, then you can begin building your list with this autoresponder plugin. Contact me for the link, it's free.

If you need help with wordpress, check out my group here on Apsense.
Nov 2nd 2010 08:01

Andre Kalis

Thanks everyone for the positive comments!

If you venture into online marketing including affiliate marketing it should be approached as a business and this business will require an investment, a capital outlay, which will be far smaller than the investment required to develop a land based business. And priorities for investment should be a good auto-responder service and a reliable domain host. Building a website with wordpress.org will cost you nothing while you can use the opt-in forms offered by your auto-responder company on your wordpress blog for blog subscriptions and even dedicate Pages (not posts) on your blog as squeeze pages - and they work!

I have no knowledge of self-hosted and self-managed auto-responders, but I know the scripts for these are often unreliable causing email delivery problems and spam complaints which can ruin your reputation and get you blocked by major email service providers. What you want is double opt-in subscribers. Remember the Spam-Can Act!
Nov 2nd 2010 11:14

Gilberto Cintron

Viral, Local, Social & Mobile Marketing Expert
@Andre Kalis - This is true. That is why this wordpress plugin is Can Spam compliant and does in fact have a double optin feature. I am using it on two of my blogs. That being said, I do use an autoresponder service for my heavy lifting. The optin level on my blog is sporadic at best, so my plugin is good for that. Incidentally, it can handle a significant amount of traffic it comes equipped with a way to regulate the number email sent per minute.

I also use Trafficwave which is a fee for use service that handles mega list on there servers so no strain on my own. This plugin is a good start for anyone being a list, and since is runs on MYSQL the db can be imported into any "real" autoresponder if/when the list grows to big.

Thanks for this great post.
Nov 2nd 2010 11:42