Our blog is ready to go and completely synced to our social media profile… so what’s left? I would have to say that the number one way to deliver the “big money” to your website (while increasing your readership at the same time) is to start into the wonderful world of email marketing!

Creating your first “list” is a task that many feel should be left only to the professionals — but I tell you that this is not so! If you are only capturing leads through your Feedburner RSS feed, then you are missing out on at least 50% of your traffic potential. If is very easy to get yourself a digital product to offer and pull additional leads by gifting them to your subscribers in exchange for their email addresses. The possibilities are endless once you have a user signed up to your email list, and I’m sure that you will find your efforts well rewarded once your list starts growing larger day after day.

Advantages of Building an “Opt-In” Email List

If you own a blog for the purposes of driving revenue, it is definitely in your best interest to own a list. Remember that starting a blog is free, but paying for a newsletter service to help you manage an “opt-in” subscriber base is certainly not. The reason for this? Email marketing is more lucrative. Once someone subscribes (aka “opts in”) to your email list, you have captured their name and email. With this, you can send them targeted offers and promotions built on making you commission off of their sales. It is a lot easier to add subscribers via a list than RSS, so once you start building your listing up… the promotions you offer become a lot more profitable.

People that opt-in to an email list are inherently more willing to pay for a product than someone casually reading a blog. Imagine you have an offer that converts at 8% via email and pays you a $35 commission for each referral. If you have just started a list, you have 100 people and have just made a commission of $280. That ain’t bad for sending an email! Now let’s say you continue building your list and get it to 1,000 members — you are now making $2,800 for that one email! Let’s wrap this up by saying you send your list an email like this just once a week… hardly enough to annoy anyone into leaving your list… you now are making $145,600 in commission every year! Wow.

The Best Email Marketing Hosts

Newsletters run right alongside your blog, and mesh very well with your content, so they are really a no brainer to any blog owner looking to boost revenue at low cost. I’ve used a few of these services throughout the years, and have settled on Aweber as my personal favorite. Aweber is the industry leader and offers a TON of great options at less than $20 a month — a price you should easily be able to gain back after your first offer conversion . Here is my list of the top three newsletter services based on my experience:

1. Aweber – Get Your First Month for Just $1 (LIMITED TIME)
2. Constant Contact
3. Vertical Response

All of these services are excellent, but again I have found that the most cost-conscience decision is with Aweber… whom is the #1 trustee of the affiliate marketing community and a great company to work with. With that, I highly recommend that you check out these options and consider the fee to run a service only in light of the potential profits from these services.

Setting Up Your First Campaign

Okay, so you’ve registered for one of these sites and you want to start building your list. There are literally dozens of different methods out there for getting your list started, but the number one technique that I endorse for blog owners is simply putting an opt-in on their blog. As you can see in my current design, I am offering a free digital download to anyone who simply enters their email address to opt into my email marketing list. This is a quick and dirty way to generate tons of additional subscribers, and I think it is perfect for bloggers even despite the fact that everyone seems to be doing it these days.

Logging into your Aweber account, it is quite easy to set up an opt-in list with one of their pre-defined templates. I would recommend simply asking for the users’ name and email, so that you can target emails to them with subject lines like “Hey Jim, check out this cool offer!” Aweber makes it quite easy to slap their code right into your blog and see it work immediately to start converting offers.

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Need to give your users an incentive to join? Offer them a digital download (software,ebook, etc)! Don’t have an eBook? Subscribe to my newsletter and download one of my books… if you leave my links you can give my book to your readers for free!
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Bottom Line: Now that you have made your blog and have a fully customized & monetized look, it is in your best interest to start to plan for the future and build up your email marketing list. The sooner you start, the more you will be able to profit down the road. Not only are lists useful for pushing commission-based products, but you can also send people broadcasts from your blog to keep them coming back and reading your content. With so much seamless integration, setting up your first email marketing campaign is a must.

-Jimvesting dot com

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