Affiliate Marketing: The Money is in the List!

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 1:36 pm by Kathy Jackson

Back in the dim and distant past, when Web 1 still roamed the earth, affiliate marketers didn’t need to build an opt-in mailing list. Really! It’s true! Affiliate marketers could buy mailing lists and they could just ‘harvest’ email addresses from anywhere they wanted.

They could send unlimited and unsolicited marketing emails to anybody and everybody without the recipient’s consent.

The problem was that these affiliate marketers of old filled up the inboxes of the ‘powers-that-be’ and those powers didn’t like it.

SPAM was a big problem for just us ordinary, everyday internet users but when it became a problem to the big guys, CAN SPAM was enacted by the Congress of the United States. Yes! Congress did act!

In the beginning there was much moaning and groaning and gnashing of teeth but as it turned out CAN SPAM is actually a very good thing for legitimate affiliate marketers.

The emails that we send to the members of our opt-in lists aren’t buried in hundreds of unsolicited marketing and pornographic emails and the recipients of our marketing emails actually read them…and act on them!

Today, in the brave new world of Web 2.0, list building has become one of the primary concerns of affiliate marketers everywhere and in every niche. We’ve found out that when potential customers agree to receive marketing emails from us that they turn into paying customers much more often.

We’ve also learned that it is easier and certainly much more cost-effective to sell a second and third time to the same customer than it is to sell to a first time customer. CAN SPAM turned out to be a very good thing and legitimate affiliate marketers conscientiously build opt-in lists because they know that: