Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Building an email list can be tough, and properly monetizing your subscribers can be extremely difficult. Most online marketers really struggle with list building, but in reality it’s easy. Just like traffic generation, list building is a scientific process. You just can’t go wrong if you follow a plan that’s based off of real results. But I’m not going to talk about list building; I want to talk about list monetization strategies you can use to squeeze money out of your subscribers.
Really, monetizing your list isn’t hard to do at all. But if you do one thing wrong you can ruin your chances of ever selling anything again. Just yesterday I talked about 4 cool ways to build a responsive email list, as that’s what you have to do before you attempt to monetize your subscribers. You have to build some trust, give away some cool stuff and add to your bank of good will. Once you’ve done that, then you can start monetizing your subscribers with these strategies. Just don’t tip the balance of too much promotion over valuable information you send your subscribers.
Remember: Your subscribers will only love you and buy the stuff you recommend if they feel like they know, like and trust you. Anyway – here are the 4 monetization strategies:
- Promoting Launches
- Cutting Special Deals
- Promoting Membership Sites
- Your Own Products
Just a quick note: You need to use all of the monetization strategies + more. There isn’t any best way to monetize your list. If you promote too much of the same kind of thing your list will eventually resent you. So it’s important to mix it up and promote a variety of different products, services and product launches. Let’s go into them:
In this guide
1. Promoting Launches
Product launches happen every day. If you’re in the Internet/Network Marketing niche then this strategy is perfect for you. We’ve all come across a product launch at one time or another. Product launches happen all over the place. On Clickbank, the Warrior Forum and some of them are even private. Product launches are exactly what the name suggests, a launch of a product. Usually what happens is a couple of guys get together and create a product.
Once their product is done they hire a copywriter, get a sales page up and start testing it. Then once conversions are good they announce their upcoming launch to all the affiliates in their niche and their JV partners. Come launch time, thousands of people email the product to their lists and the product sells thousands of copies. Pretty straight forward right?
Yep, they are and 99% of the time huge buzz is built around product launches before they actually launch. People start talking about them way before the launch and they sort of go viral. The cool thing about launches it that they convert like crazy and payout huge commissions, that’s the main reason why you should promote launches. The conversions are great, the products are great, BUT – everyone in the industry promotes them.
That’s why I rarely promote product launches. Just because I want to send unique stuff to my list that not everyone else is sending. However promoting a launch or three a year is a great idea. When you do promote them, promote hard. Email several times and offer bonuses to your subscribers if they buy through your link. You can find upcoming product launches to promote on JV Notify Pro (checked as of July, 2024) and other launch boards.
2. Cutting Special Deals
As I said the biggest problem with product launches is everyone promotes them. All your competitors and fellow marketers will be promoting them and your subscribers may be getting hammered with 5 emails from 5 different marketers promoting the same launch. To be totally unique and make your subscribers feel special, you can send them a special offer. You do this by cutting a special deal with a product owner. Think about it, there are hundreds if not thousands of high quality products in your niche that aren’t doing very well.
You can simply contact the product owner, arrange a deal where he gives your subscribes 75% off for a few days. You could get the product owner on a webinar with you and your subscribers, on the webinar you could explain the product and how your subscribers have X amount of time to get it for 75% off. Every single online guru cuts special deals with other marketers…. And they use webinars to sell the products. It’s a simple strategy, get a deal on a great product, host a webinar showing your subscribes how cool it is and enforce a strong call to action that implies “you have 1 minute to get this offer or the price goes up….”
3. Promoting Membership Sites
No matter what niche you’re in you should always be able to find a good membership site. I personally promote 1 membership site to every soul who joins my email list/s. No matter what list, you should have 1 core membership site you promote to everyone. You can constantly promote it in phases. Promoting a membership site just makes sense, its passive income. If people are paying monthly for a membership, that means you can make residual income.
Let’s say you come across an Internet Marketing membership site that teaches a ton of cool stuff. The site costs $100/month to join and the affiliate program pays out $50. If you can make just 50 sales, that’s $2500 in monthly income straight in your pocket. $50/month for each active member. With a large enough list, you could run a simple 2 week promotion and make 50 sales easy.
4. Your Own Products
Lastly is the most powerful strategy of all, launching your own products. This isn’t for everyone, as it’s the most advanced strategy of all. Saying that, even if you’re a complete beginner you’ll eventually get to a point where you’ll want to sell your own products. Selling your own products to your subscribers gives you an instant advantage. You are the owner, it puts up a wall of authority between you and your subscribers saying “Hey, I’m not a little affiliate – I’m an expert with my own products”. In response your subscribers go “holy crap, this guy really knows his stuff”.
You have a lot of options when it comes to selling your own products. You could do a launch on your own Optimize Press site and just use Ejunkie for a shopping cart. Or you could launch on a marketplace like Clickbank or even PayDotCom. One way or another, you will eventually want to start selling your own products to your list.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Put your name and email in the form on the right to get more cool email marketing tips, tricks and secrets. Also leave me your thoughts, comments and questions in the box below.
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Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Donna K Guyett, November 18, 2011, 18:48
All of the above makes perfect sense. However, being brand new, my big question is WHERE do you start in developing an email list of people to try to help train. Where do you get your initial leads. I have watched hours and hours of videos of how to help, how to build, how to grow, but nowhere does it give any clue as to where to start in finding the people initially.
Robin, November 17, 2011, 03:05
Simple but effective way to get more responsiveness from your list. If you don’t mind I’d like to add another one Dave… email regularly… Thanks for these tips!
Kimberly Flores, November 17, 2011, 03:05
Great stuff David, and it does work. I have incorporated this concept and have seen an increase in list size. This particular post seems to fit right in there! Thanks for sharing.
Julia Ramirez, November 17, 2011, 03:05
Fantastic System David!
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
The membership site section asserts you can “run a simple 2 week promotion” and hit a target number of sales “easy” — where’s that from? No mention of list size, open rate, or how many promotions it took to arrive at that assumption. “Easy” is doing enormous work in that paragraph and I don’t see the mechanism underneath it.
Raj, I had the exact same question reading it and I’m glad you asked because I was going to feel silly bringing it up — sorry if this is obvious to everyone else, but is “promoting launches” something you can even do with a very small list, or does it only work once you already have a lot of people to email?
Three of these four assume I have time to build relationships with product owners, host webinars, or build my own product from scratch. On forty-five minutes a day between shift and bedtime, promoting an existing launch is the only one of the four that’s actually doable this month. The other three are next-year plans, not this-week plans.
I think what’s often missed reading this is the warning buried in the launches section — that promoting too many launches burns your list because everyone else is sending the same thing. That’s a genuinely useful piece of restraint in a post that otherwise reads as “do all four constantly.” Worth pulling out on its own.
Ran a diner nineteen years, and the “cutting special deals” section is the one I recognized down to the bone. We had a butcher we knew — quiet arrangement, a good price on a cut nobody else was moving that week, and the regulars who got wind of it felt like they’d been let in on something the rest of town hadn’t. Never advertised it out front, just word of mouth to the people who came in enough that we trusted them not to make a fuss to the ones who didn’t get it. Reading this, the online version is the exact same instinct dressed in webinar software and a countdown timer — the special isn’t really about the discount, it’s about being one of the people who got told. Works the same whether it’s brisket or somebody else’s course.
Birdie, that’s the same trick we ran in the eighties with a phone tree instead of a webinar link. Older than the internet.
Birdie’s diner example is the clearest thing in this whole comment section. In plain English: find someone with a good product nobody’s buying, agree a discount, tell people the clock’s ticking. That’s “cutting special deals.” Four paragraphs to say what she said in two sentences.
Birdie, for the online version — how many days did urgency actually move conversion, versus just the last few hours? Piece never says.