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Previous articles in this series:
Part 1: Create A Plan
Part 2: Laying The Foundation
Part 3: Building Landing Pages

This is the last preparation step for your authority affiliate site… I promise. After this, we will create the pay-per-click campaigns, start sending traffic, and hopefully start making sales.

Email lists can be a very effective form of affiliate marketing, but they are not a blanket solution. You need to use discretion when it comes to implementing them in your market. Some niches might work well with a forced opt-in (squeeze page) while others might be best without an email system at all. For the affiliate site that I am building, I decided to put the opt-in form in the header so that it is there for people who want it, but doesn’t bother people who don’t.

Choosing A System

The first step to setting up your autoresponder funnel is to get the technical aspects out of the way. You need a system for collecting leads, managing those leads, sending pre-written email sequences, and sending broadcast messages. Those are the basic and essential functions that any autoresponder system should have.

To implement this, you can either pay a company to handle everything for you, or you can buy software that will help you do it yourself. Both choices have advantages and disadvantages, so the ultimate decision is a matter of your needs and preferences. I’ll try to discuss some of the pros and cons of each.

Subscribing With An Autoresponder Company

When you pay for an account with a full-service autoresponder company, you don’t have to do anything other than collect leads and send emails. Your account is ready to use immediately and everything else is taken care of. You will, however, pay good money for it.

And paying for the service is really the only downside. You don’t want to go with a sketchy company because reliability is very important, but at the same time, the good companies are not cheap. They start out cheap, but limit the number of total leads you can store. Aweber, for example, limits you to 10,000 leads for a basic account and then $10 per month for each additional block of 10,000 leads.

This might not seem like a drawback, but if you are in a popular niche (or enough niches), you will be collecting a lot of leads. It can get very expensive very quickly, which is why I prefer setting up my own system.

Installing Your Own Autoresponder Server

If you’re going to set up your own solution, you will need a dedicated server for it. It doesn’t need to be extremely powerful (I’ve used a $30/month VPS before) but it does need to be dedicated to nothing but sending these emails. If you put it on a shared server (even your sites are the only others on it), everything will be brought to a crawl when the emails are processed.

Another downside is that you will need to spend a good amount of time installing, configuring, and optimizing your set up so that it works properly. If you are up to the task, however, you will have a robust autoresponder server that is extensible and does not limit the amount of subscribers you can store.

So Which Should You Go With?

If you are unsure, you definitely want to go with a subscription service. You will be up and running in minutes, have access to tech support, and be worry free. You can always set up your own dedicated system once you start outgrowing your subscription and are making serious money from your lists.

Creating A List And Installing Subscription Forms

Since I don’t use Aweber, and I’m recommending that most of you should, I can’t really give exact steps for creating your list. However, no matter what service you are using, the setup process should be fairly straightforward. You basically just need to define your list so that you have a place to store your leads.

Once that has been done, grab the HTML form code that your autoresponder service provides for you and put it onto your landing page. Again, how you implement it is completely up to you and how you think it should be applied to your market. For my current site, I am going with a very unobtrusive opt-in form, placing it in the header for people that are looking for more information.

Writing Follow-up Sequences

The real benefit of any email list lies within the emails that you send to your prospects. When they subscribe to your list, you basically have two options for staying in contact with them. You can send broadcast messages that go out on demand to all of your subscribes, or you can send pre-written email sequences. Broadcast messages are great for promoting a special promotion, but you should also have a sequence that will be used for building relationships.

When writing your follow-up sequence, there are a few things you need to decide on. You need to decide how often you are going to send emails and what type of content you are going to send them.

It is probably best to start out with a high frequency (1 email per day for about a week) so that they get used to receiving emails from you. Then you can drop it down to ever other day, and finally once a week. Any more and they will probably get sick and tired of your repeated emails. Any less and they could forget who you are (remember, you want to maintain a relationship).

You don’t have to physically send these emails out every day, you simply write them ahead of time and then schedule their delivery on your autoresponder service. For example, you will write an intro email that goes out as soon as someone subscribes, a “day after” email, a second day email, a third day email, and so on. The delivery time is relative to when each subscriber joined your list.

As for what to actually send them, there are three main approaches that I have used effectively. They are:

• How-To Course - This will be the most valuable for your readers. Provide them with a 7-Day course and you can bet that they will be anticipating each new email you send them. You should try to work affiliate links to the guides.
• Storytelling - I wrote a quick example of a storytelling sequence in this post, so I’m not going to go over it here. Everyone likes stories and your readers will be wanting to know what happens “next”. Again, work affiliate links into the story.
• News & Updates - This is the easiest because it doesn’t require any real content, but it is also the least valuable. Most people don’t care to get frequent news, but it can be a good way to bring new products to their attention… until they have had enough and decide to unsubscribe.

The main idea here is to always build a relationship. If you give them content that they enjoy, they will start to become “friends” with you. Many of your subscribers will actually reply to your emails as if you had been sending them personally (they don’t know any better). When the time comes for you to recommend a product or service, they are going to put a lot of trust in your recommendation because you are their “friend”.

How This Fits Into Our Strategy

This article discussed the last step in getting your affiliate site ready for paid traffic. You don’t have to set up an email list, but it can really prove beneficial, especially since we are building an authority site.

Once we start releasing new features on the main site (the non-PPC version) we can send broadcast messages to our list and get instant exposure. And you can bet that they will be more than happy to hear about all the free content and awesome features that we have made available to them.

Next Article

In the next installment of this series, we will be talking about building your pay-per-click campaigns. I will go over concepts such as choosing keywords, writing ads, and collecting valuable data so that the campaign can be optimized in the future.