If you are an affiliate marketer who wants to make a comfortable living from referring your prospects to other people’s product or service for decent commissions, then you must consider building your own mailing list.  Building your mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best investments you will ever make.  It is worth spending the time and effort on.

Consider the alternatives:

• Free Traffic from SEO, Article Marketing:
  • can take months to generate real meaningful traffic
  • many of the visitors come only once or twice and sales often don’t happen until the 7th visit
  • doesn’t capture a customer for future sales
• Google AdWords or other PPC
  • you pay for every click, at most 5% will buy
  • as soon as you stop paying for the traffic, the traffic stops coming – no prospects, no sales
  • bid on the wrong keyword and it gets expensive in a hurry (sometimes with no return revenue)

If you capture your prospects email address when they come to visit you can contact them, for free, at a time of your choosing.  This allows you to provide them with

• your Ezine which may include
  • paid ads
  • affiliate products
  • your own products
• remindrs of the products you have and
  • new products to be released
  • new way of using your existing products
  • product bundles at reduced prices just for subscribers
  • discount coupons

Also, when you participate in a Joint Venture or have a new product or service to endorse, you need to look no further than your own mailing list.  Granted, most affiliates, as in more than 90 percent of them, are not making money from affiliate programs, but this often is the result of focusing their efforts on the least effective methods.  Having your own mailing list is not the only effective affiliate marketing method.  However, you can make affiliate sales very quickly even within a few hours of sending a sales message.  Provided that your mailing list is huge and responsive.

In a nutshell, the affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who owns a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.  Ezine newsletters, e-books, and downloadable software are just some of the ways to build a large and responsive opt-in list.