List Building Tips For The Affiliate Marketer

by Titus Hoskins

Network Marketing Articles

Published on this site: December 17th, 2010 - See more articles from this month

If you're into affiliate marketing you will probably already know how important list building is to your overall success. However, I sometimes get the feeling from close examination of my competitor's sites that list building takes a back seat in their site layout and design. One also gets the general feeling that list building is not as important as it once was, especially in the early days of online marketing before the advent of so many social media/networking sites.

Granted for the ordinary webmaster, in the age of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, building your own personal autoresponder lists have taken a backseat to these social networking sites which obviously builds your subscriber list for you. But these are third-party sites controlling your subscribers and while they more or less eliminates the whole notion of unwanted spam, they do present issues regarding the use of these lists.

Coming from the old school of marketing, I realized the importance of my lists from the start. I also realized the most difficult part of building a list was not getting the subscribers, but connecting in some way with them and building trusting relationships with lists in the tens of thousands is not an easy thing to accomplish.

List building in regards to affiliate marketing is of special interest to me since I am a full-time affiliate marketer and anything which makes my job easier I will try. Like most affiliate marketers, I have created niche sites dealing with the products and services which I promote. One major component of these sites is the list building element. On almost all my sites I try to capture my visitor's contact information to give follow-up information which lets me market to these subscribers in a very subtle way.

The important thing here is to offer free ebooks, guides or e-courses in order to capture this contact information before these customers are sent along to the merchant's site. This is the "old squeeze page" which many online marketers use in order to build their own list of potential prospects for their offers.

This must be a "win-win" situation for everyone involved so I like connecting these lists to special sales, coupons and deals which are offered by the merchants. These customers can get $100's off the price of the products featured so that they end up with a good deal and you end up with a sale.

All this couldn't be possible if you didn't build your list of targeted clients or customers looking for the products you're promoting. List building in this area has proven very effective for my affiliate marketing, so effective I try to put my subscriber form or box on all my webpages. So if you're an affiliate marketer who is sending your visitors directly to your merchant's site, think again, and see if building or capturing your visitor's contact information is worth your while? If done properly, this can be an excellent way of increasing your sales and commissions.

Another form of list building which I believe too many affiliate marketers take for granted is the powerful little "cookie". For those not in the business, a cookie is simply a piece of code which identifies your referrals as belonging to you or your affiliate ID, if a sale is made immediately or for any time in the future you will get credit for the sale because you referred the customer or client.

Now, the trick here is to pick affiliate products and programs which have a 90 Day Cookie or more; if a sale is made in those 90 days you get credit for the sale. The longer the length the better, there are even some products and companies which give life-time cookies.

Why is this so important you ask?

Well, if you have a popular site you can quickly build up a long list of potential customers cookied with your affiliate IDs. The larger the list, the more sales you will make. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game, the more numbers you have, the easier it is to succeed. I have found this so profitable that I try to "cookie" all the lists I build in the process mentioned above, so that all these potential customers have my affiliate IDs attached.

So it doesn't take a genius to realize, used in combination, this can be an extremely profitable form of list building which every affiliate marketer should be doing if they haven't already figured out this simple marketing strategy. Build your lists, cookie your lists, and then sit back and reap the rewards.

Copyright (c) 2010 Titus Hoskins.

Titus Hoskins: If you want to find out more about list building, why try this handy eCourse: http://www.bizwaremagic.com/opt-in.htm. Or if you want to find out more about affiliate marketing try here: http://www.marketingtoolguide.com/.