Success is a beautiful word! And success at email marketing is a beautiful phrase — it means huge profits in your pockets. But here are many ways to fail at email marketing — so be smart and read up.

These techniques will help you build a large profitable list that makes money for you far into the future:

In part two of this two-part blog post, we will continue our look at the problem that almost every email marketer faces when they first set out to make money from their lists: how to convert the names on the list into paying customers.

#7 – Give Valuable Advice

Maintain a good relationship with your list by supplying them with regular good-quality advice. That is paramount to having a successful and profitable list.

Another great way of interacting with your list is to ask questions when you send out an email. Always make sure that your members can contact you. Remember, it’s a two-way process; it’s all about establishing a warm relationship.

#8 – Offer Freebies

You can help keep this relationship warm by giving free ebooks and courses.

With some of these, offer your members paid upgrades. If your members like what you are giving them, they will be happy to upgrade.

Initially, keep the price low. By offering an upgrade at something like $7.00, you can establish more trust. Also, this will help confirm that you have a list that doesn’t mind spending money online.

#9 – Don’t Cross-Sell

One thing that is vitally important is that your list needs to be kept on topic. Don’t be tempted to cross-sell to a list.

For example, you may have a list that contains people interested in photography. You may also have a second list whose members are interested in weight loss. Don’t be tempted to sell a weight-loss product to your photography list. The photography list must get photography-related emails, and the weight loss list must have only weight-loss-related content.

However, there is nothing stopping you from casually cross-promoting your ezines. For example, you could get some of your photography list to sign up for your weight-loss list by mentioning something about weight loss in a conversational manner.

Then mention that, if they’re interested, they can sign up for your newsletter or free weight-loss ebook. Be sure to make this promotion an aside or a postscript, not a main part of the email.

#10 – Avoid the Internet Marketing Sector

When starting out with email marketing, I would strongly advise you to avoid the Internet marketing sector. There is nothing worse than generating a list and then marketing a product to them, only to find that 20 other people have marketed the same product to them.

To work effectively in the Internet marketing niche, you need to have good email marketing skills and access to excellent bonuses. You need to be able to offer your members something that all the other marketers can’t. So, until you can develop these additional components to compete successfully, avoid it.

#11 – Seek a Niche You Know About

It is far easier to hone your skills in a sector on which you have excellent knowledge. Having knowledge of a sector will allow you to quickly establish yourself as an expert. And people are much more likely to follow the advice and recommendations of an expert, so selling to that list will be easier.

Never be tempted to bluff your list, though. It’s almost a certainty that there will be people on your list who know more than you!

#12 – Getting Started

So how do you get to the stage where you can sell to your list? The first thing you should do is to write 10 or more newsletters\emails giving general advice and tips on the subject. Then add them to your autoresponder.

#13 – Establish a Schedule, and Keep Them Interested

Decide how often you want these sent out to members and configure your autoresponder to send these out. I would recommend once a week as a good frequency to start with. In these initial emails, give as much help and advice as you can. If you keep your subscribers interested at this stage, then they should remain members of the list for a long time.

So, now we are up to about week 10. You can now start to send out weekly newsletters that you’ve just written. You can talk about recent developments in the sector and give more up-to-date advice.

Now might also be a good time to give your a list a good, related CPA (cost per action) offer, ideally one that gives your list something for free. For example, if you had a golf list, you could look for a CPA offer where your members would get free golf balls. Give them the details of this offer and your affiliate link.

Such CPA freebie offers are a win-win. Your subscribers get free golf balls, and you earn income. Plus you’ve just proved the value of your ezine to your members, and you are on your way to maintaining a profitable list.

#14 – The End Result: Sales

We’ve seen that by keeping a good relationship with your list, you can ensure that your list is responsive to your offers when you make them. Remember, don’t treat your list as “pockets to be picked,” but rather as friends to whom you give good advice. If you do, you will continue making sales for many years to come.

Many affiliate marketers’ first taste of email marketing is when they themselves get on the list of some Internet marketing guru. They then get the impression that email marketing is about sending out three or four emails a week, offering every new product that comes out.

Hopefully, after reading this two-part blog post, you now know that email marketing is not necessarily like that. Email marketing for the rest of us is about building relationships based on trust.

How many times have you heard that “the money is in the list”? This often-quoted statement is actually quite misleading. It should read that the money is in a well-managed and highly responsive list.

In this two-part blog post, we’ll look at the whole process – from gathering names to converting those names into valuable clients.

Email marketing can be summed up in one small anecdote: Two rustlers stood looking at a field of cows, and the young rustler says: “Let’s run into the field and grab a cow.” To which the old rustler replies: “No let’s walk in slowly and grab them all.”

Let’s begin…

#1 – Offer Incentives

The first step in building your list is to get members to sign up. You can achieve this in many ways. The usual method is to place a signup box on a web page and ask people to sign up to your newsletter. However, there are more effective methods. You can offer incentives such as free ebooks, or video guides, or even a free 7-day course.

The better your offer, the more signups you will achieve. Many people would happily sign up for a regular newsletter. However, by adding incentives, you increase your sign up rate and potentially increase your earnings from your list.

#2 – Getting Customers through Forums

Now that you have decided how you will entice your members to sign up, it’s time to get them to read your offer.

If we wanted to generate an email list that would focus on photography, then we could go to a photography forum and start to post messages. By answering questions and being helpful in the forum, we would soon be recognized as an authority on the subject.

We could then add details of our newsletter to our forum signature. While this method is quite effective, we could add one more step that would help to really increase our signups.

#3 – Get Testimonials

Just as you can make incentives available to people who sign up to your list, you can offer these incentives directly to members of the forum. I have also seen this method work really well, with a slight added twist.

Instead of offering a free guide to any particular member of the forum, one member created an ebook and posted that he was shortly going to sell this through ClickBank. He said he would be happy to give free copies of the guide to forum members in return for testimonials.

Within a few hours he had 500 new members in his list, all of which were interested in the particular subject.

He may have lost out on a few sales of his book. But he gained in the long run from additional sales, and even from affiliate sales, since a number of members promoted the book he released. Many people would balk at giving away a book they intended to sell.

But selling the book was never the main focus of this promotion; getting a list was.

#4 – Don’t Sell…Yet

Once we have a list, we need to give the members the value they joined for, and if possible surpass their expectations. The members most likely joined to get help and advice, but they are expecting you to sell to them. After all, that’s what everyone does, isn’t it? You are going to surprise them by giving them what they wanted and not selling to them…yet!

#5 – Establish a Relationship First

Under no circumstances should you attempt to sell anything to your list before you have established a good relationship with them. This can take many weeks or months. In fact, I’ve heard it mentioned that you shouldn’t attempt to sell to list in the first year.

Personally I think that is a bit long. But it indicates that a list needs to be nurtured before you sell to it. I never attempt to sell anything to a list until they have had at least 10-15 informative emails from me.

#6 – Ease Into Selling

People join your lists for information. If you wish to keep your members subscribed, make sure that you attempt to sell to them only on an infrequent basis. You’ll notice that many list owners will send two or three offers a week. The conversion rate on these lists is usually very poor, and they rely on a constant influx of new members to replace members who unsubscribe.

I have one list of fewer than 60 people, and if I send them an offer, my conversion rate is usually in excess of 20-25%. This list has only had one offer sent to it in the last six months.

Yet this one small list is responsible for more than $500 of recurring income every month. I have revealed these facts to demonstrate two things. First, you don’t need a large list. And second, a well-managed list can be very profitable.