In a previous article I explained the essential system that you need to construct if you’re going to build a list for email list marketing. It was extremely simple, about as simple as they come.

As I explained, if you are looking to build a list, all you needed was qualified traffic, and website that’s capable and optimized to capture their e-mail addresses for your email marketing lists. I wasn’t trying to be funny there; I was just trying to be honest about what it takes to run a successful email marketing campaign.

List building is a really simple thing that most people really overcomplicate, and I’d like to try and detangle the process and show you just how simple it really is to succeed at direct email marketing. Now that you know the basic system, I’m going to explain the most important factors for list building for email list marketing, just as simply.

Alright, there are two main important factors when it comes to list building. Are you ready for them? Here they are- you need traffic, and you need to convert that traffic.

Once again, I am not trying to be funny here. The first thing you need is traffic to fuel your email marketing campaign. You need people coming to your website, the one that is built around capturing email lists. In general, the more traffic you get the better, for a reason that I’ll mention when I talk about conversion.

Of course you don’t just want to have anyone come to your site; you want qualified traffic- people who are interested in what you’re selling. The more of it the better, so it’s a good idea to employ a number of different strategies to drive this traffic to your site to succeed at email list marketing.

Now, all of the qualified traffic in the world isn’t going to do much of anything for you if you don’t actually convert that traffic for your email marketing lists.

Conversion is nothing more than the percent of visitors to your capture page that actually go ahead and take the action that you want them to take. If you’re tracking conversion on a sales page, you’re tracking how many people are actually buying the product compared to how many people are visiting the page. For list building purposes, your conversion rate is equal to the number of people who give you their email address relative to the number of people who just arrive at your site and then leave. Memorize this, as it is crucial for building your list for direct email marketing.

And that’s it. The most important factors to consider are your volume of qualified traffic and you conversion rate. Raise your conversion rate by tweaking your site design and a greater percent of the people you send to your site will give you their address. Increase your traffic and a large volume of people will be converted and join your list. It’s dead simple, but it’s important you understand that this is basically what list building is all about.

More and more merchandising realizes the significance of using email marketing software to boost their online standing. This isn’t really surprising considering how advantageous this method is compared to the others indirect way of selling products. For those who are currently thinking about getting email marketing programs, following are some of the perks of this type of program.

Direct Client Contact

With email marketing, business owners can send sales pitches to a person’s email address with just a click of a button. This direct approach is much more compelling than simply posting ads all over the website, making it more likely for individuals to follow links and make a purchase.

Tracking

Moreover, great thing about these programs is that they make it easy to track target market activity. All kinds of information starting from who received the files, who opened them and which messages elicited a response are vital for planning ahead. With this information, businesses will be able to gather information on what worked on their clients and what didn’t. Based on this data, they can then structure another marketing pitch that will increase the impact to their clients.

Installation Options

Some programs can be installed on the computer and can be run independently while others need to be integrated with CRM software. This variation in choices makes the programs become easier for business owners to pick the best set up that would work for them.

Preset Actions

With software, business owners can simply schedule newsletters to be sent on specific dates and time, allowing them to concentrate on bigger concerns for the business. With the email marketing side taken care of, owners can deal with improving their product or service or even accumulating more names to add to their existing list. These programs are so advanced that individuals can have them set up to send messages weeks or even months ahead.

Inexpensive

In the long run, email marketing programs will prove to be an excellent investment. Studies show that ROI when it comes to online marketing, the results are pretty solid, allowing individuals to gain back their initial capital through sales. The cost of the program itself is little, depending on the sophistication of what the person purchases. In most cases, these programs come with a money back guarantee, allowing buyers to regain their money if they aren’t happy with the results.

Note though, that not all email marketing software are the same. Individuals should take the time to find one with a good reputation in the industry. Choose marketing software that can be effortlessly customized to gather user requirements. Some of the features that might prove useful include, but are not limited to:

- Easy management of the people in the list.
- Makes it possible for users to create groups, allowing them to send specific emails to specific people for highly targeted marketing approaches.
- Makes it easy for individuals to subscribe and unsubscribe.
- Offers statistics on the number of emails sent, which ones are opened and what email messages are forwarded to third party individuals. Tracking of how many emails generated direct sales, and which ones triggered un-subscriptions will also help a lot in creating new marketing pitches next time.

Reading reviews about the product will also help a lot in figuring out how it performs. Make sure to check out as many reviews as possible to get a clear idea of the program’s advantages and disadvantages. With the right choice of email marketing software, online businesses should find their venture flourishing; keep in mind though that email marketing should only be one part of the process.

Most of the affiliate marketing that I do is organic search traffic, not paid traffic. I try not to rely on sources that require payment in order to drive traffic. That’s just my personal budgetary preference, though, since paid traffic does, indeed, work…if you know what you’re doing. You can lose your shirt if you make some rookie mistakes.

When starting out with paid traffic, one question that arises is, “Do I direct link to the affiliate page or create my own landing page?”

To create a Google ad, you have to put in both a “destination URL” and a “display URL”. The display URL is the one that shows on the ad. The destination URL is the link that the click will actually follow. Google’s Terms of Use state that the domain on which the visitor ultimately sees after clicking should match the display URL. So, for example,

Direct linking is when the URL that your Google Ad points to is the one that belongs to the affiliate themselves. For example, if I were creating an add for a product at Clickbank, I can create the ad with a destination URL that points to the Clickbank site, with my affiliate ID, but I MUST set the display URL to the domain that belongs to the affiliate, since that’s where the person clicking ends up. This is called direct linking. I’m using my ad to drive traffic directly to the affiliate page.

The main advantage of direct linking is that you don’t need any programming experience to build your own landing page, and don’t need to take the time or invest the cost in creating your own page. For some folks, it’s just easier to create a bunch of ads pointing directly to the affiliate page and let it go.

However, there are three disadvantages of direct linking:
1. ad rotation
2. direct traffic
3. some affiliate products restrict direct linking

Google rotates ads that point to the same display URL. If you and 99 other folks are advertising a specific affiliate product, and are all using direct link, you dilute the number of times your ad will be seen. Google will only return one ad per display URL when a search is performed.

Also, a good number of web users will type in the display URL directly to their browser rather than click an ad. (I have two case studies I’ll talk about in another article that prove this.) I’m not sure all the reasons why they do this, but some users are wary of ads. They figure that if the site is legitimate, typing the URL directly will take them there. That means you’re losing revenue by sending folks directly to the affiliate without ever having your tracking cookie planted.

Lastly, you need to check with the terms for your specific affiliate product. Some don’t let you direct link at all, and others restrict the keywords on which you can bid.

With those factors in mind, Direct Linking is already at a disadvantage over pointing clicks to a landing page of your own. There are several other advantages of using your own landing page which I’ll discuss in another article.

About 92% of Internet Marketers out there fail to make enough money selling affiliate products. When I say “enough” money, I mean they fail to generate enough to quit their day job. The other 8% however, make it real big!

What are the secrets of these successful Internet Affiliate Marketers?

I offer you another good tip here.

There are 2 ways to promote Affiliate products:

1. Non-Subscribers Based Approach

These Affiliate Marketers send all the traffic directly to the Affiliate product’s sales page and let the product owner do the selling for them, in which there will be 2 outcomes:

A. The visitor buys the product and they get a commission

B. The visitor exit without buying and will probably never step in again

This direct traffic method is the most common approach and requires almost no work from the Affiliate Marketers’ side. This is what I call a hit-and-run strategy in which the marketer basically targets a large number of visitors perpetually and hoping that some will convert to sales. And it will, by simple mathematical statistics.

But this is practically a numbers’ game as compared with the other approach. You cannot expect repeat visitors nor repeat sales to be made. A lot of diligence and discipline are required to get this method to generate good income for the Affiliate Marketer. The biggest challenge is this: the process to direct traffic to an Affiliate’s sale page can get so mechanical and monotonous it usually wears out the marketer after a while. Shortly after, you will notice another star falling from the sky, signifying the death of another Affiliate Marketer.

This is not a wrong approach, just not the best in my opinion.

2. Subscribers Based Approach

Most successful Affiliate Marketers I know would adopt this approach. This requires a personal sales page to be set up with an opt-in form. Usually, some good freebies are given away (no charge of course, as the word freebies suggest) as a goodwill Thank You gesture for the visitor to opt-in. I personally offer a good EBook and free videos for my visitors.

After the visitors opt-in, they may (or may not) get directed to the sales page of the Affiliate product that the marketer is promoting. Why?

Most of these Marketers seek to offer more value for the opt-in subscribers by giving them more information, more tips and more good offers. There are of course some bad hats out there, but generally, these Affiliate Marketers are not hit-and-run Marketers. They themselves learned through a series of bad experiences and because of that, sincerely did not want others to follow their footsteps.

If you have been in the market long enough, I am sure you would have acquired some real good products that you have purchased from genuine Affiliate Marketers. The reason is simple, they are in for the long haul. They ride on an Airbus 380 and not a 330.

However, to succeed in this approach requires more hard work in the initial set up, with some minor investment cost. Then again in the long haul, it pays back many folds over compared to the first approach if you do it right.

Equip Yourself. Market Smart!