Throughout the years that I’ve been doing affiliate marketing, I have seen a lot of marketers collecting email addresses on their landing pages. I’ve also subscribed to a lot of these email lists (using a disposable address) as a form of research. What I have found is that some marketers are maximizing their profits while others are letting their lists die.

In this article, I am going to go over a method that I use to build affiliate marketing campaigns around email lists. The idea behind it is that you can generate more cash per visitor if you have a way to contact them multiple times with multiple offers than if they just see one landing page and are gone.

Step 1: Choose A Market

The first step (as always) is to choose a target market. The key difference between choosing a market for long term contact and choosing a market for single contact is that there must be other related products that you visitors will be interested in.

Take “DVD movie rentals” for example. You could create a landing page that promotes Blockbuster and Netflix, buy PPC traffic on “dvd rental” keywords, and hope that they convert or sign up to your newsletter. But what else do you offer them?

• DVD players? No, the already have one.
• DVD movies? They are more interested in renting.
• Blank DVD-Rs or DVD-Burners? Not many people want to pirate their rentals.
• DVD copying software? Maybe, but borderline illegal.
• More rental services? They’re already getting unlimited rentals.
• Home theater equipment? Probably your best bet.

As you can see, there aren’t many viable options (that I can think of anyways). You could try to sell them on the fact that they can copy all of the movies they are renting and add them to their personal collection, but then you are advocating illegal activities and could get in some trouble. And anyways, where do you go from there? That’s only one or two additional selling points.

On the other hand, lets have a look at the “online dating” market. You could logically start from two selling points, dating advice or dating services. After capturing their email address, you could promote additional dating advice products (ebooks, physical books, videos, audios, etc) and additional dating services (for more variety). But thats not all. How about:

• Fashion advice to attract the opposite sex (affiliate links to products)
• Cologne, perfume, and pheromones
• Lingerie and adult toys
• Flowers, chocolates, and other gifts
• Tickets to concerts, shows, and other events
• Coupons for discounted meals and other date activities

I’m sure there are other directions you could take, but clearly you can see how “online dating” is much more open ended than “dvd rentals.” Keep in mind that I am not calling “dvd rentals” a bad niche, many people make good money there, but it just doesn’t do this method justice.

Step 2: Find Some Offers

We touched on this in the previous step, but now, instead of just thinking about what types of offers to promote, you need to go out and actually find affiliate programs for these offers.

If you are serious about affiliate marketing, you should have accounts with various affiliate networks. Simply browse (or search) through your favorite networks (CJ, Shareasale, Azoogle, Clickbank, etc) and pick out what you want to promote. It might also be smart to find some independent affiliate programs so that you aren’t promoting super-saturated products.

Step 3: Write A Story

Now it’s time for the fun part. You could do random, unplanned email promotions and hope to make some money; or, you can create an engaging, choreographed autoresponder sequence. I prefer the latter because once you set up the system, it runs on autopilot.

What you are going to do here is come up with a story that you can work your affiliate links into. This story is going to be broken down into sequential emails that appear to be written on time-sensitive material. Here is an example story sequence for our online dating niche:

• Email 1: I signed up to “eHarmony” last weekend and met 3 great girls right away. I have a date planned for Friday night and two planned for Saturday.
• Email 2: I’ve been a little anxious about these three dates so I started searching for some tips. Check out this great book that I found.
• Email 3: I talked to one of the girls on the phone last night and she mentioned that she loved stand up comedy. I think it’s a great idea for a date so I am going to take her to see a show. I got a discount on the tickets from this website. They have discounts on tons of stuff, I’m so glad I found it.
• Email 4: The dates went great. I am hoping to get second date from two of the three girls so I sent them a little surprise to be delivered to their work this week. Nothing big, just a single rose, but I got a great deal on them from this flowers website.

I made all of that up on the fly and you can do the same. Obviously you will need to add more information and be more detailed, but you can get the idea from my short descriptions. Have fun with it, make it interesting, and the majority of your subscribers will find it interesting too. Chances are they will be able to relate to what you are talking about and will check out your recommendations.

You can space them out however you want: once a day, every other day, once a week, whatever. As long as you aren’t bombarding them will hard sells, they won’t view your messages as spam. Many of them will want to be your friend

Try to continue the relationship as long as possible so that it only ends when they unsubscribe, not when you run out of emails. It isn’t unrealistic for internet marketers to have these email campaigns go on for one year, two years, or more.

Step 4: Put It Into Action

Now that you have defined a suitable market, have found related offers to promote, and have developed an interesting story as your promotion vehicle, your final step is to put it all together. I’m not going to go too much into detail here because it could get very technical, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out and I’m sure there are plenty of help articles just a Google search away.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have access to an autoresponder. You can use a hosted solution such as Aweber (monthly fees) or a dedicated solution such as Autoresponse Plus (one-time fee). From within your autoresponder account, you will need to create a new sequence and load up all your emails. Then, you will need to get your “subscription form” code to place on your landing page.

How your capture emails on your landing page is entirely up to you. You could use a standard popup, a DHTML popup, an in-line subscription box, or anything else you can think of. You could even send visitors directly to the subscription form and require that they fill it out before continuing.

I like to make the subscription box as unobtrusive as possible. I still want my visitors to check out the offer that they came searching for; capturing their email address is just a bonus. To maximize subscriptions, you should give some sort of incentive, even if it is just calling your autoresponder sequence a “free tips” newsletter.

Compound Effect of Mailing Lists

The great thing about building an autoresponder sequence with years of content is that as your list continues to grow, the amount of emails you are sending out also continues to grow. This translates into huge potential for affiliate sales and commissions.

If you are collecting 30 subscribers per day, you will have almost eleven thousand after just one year. Imagine sending eleven thousand emails every day, to people who enjoy getting those emails, and who are interested in what you have to say. The potential to generate massive commissions is obvious.