If you can build a list of people passionately interested in your niche, and provide them with good information on a regular basis, and the occasional freebie, you’ll develop a good relationship with them.  This can be turned into a nice little earner.

Your first step, as with any online business, is to check out your niche. Are there enough people interested in it, are there some good affiliate products to match, are there enough searches on related keywords, and what is the competition like? Once you’ve chosen your niche, let’s get started.

There are a couple of ways of earning money from your mailing list. In this post, we’ll look at a monetising a mailing list that’s free for a subscriber to join.

You really don’t need much to get started publishing a free email newsletter. A domain and web hosting is necessary, but one important essential is an autoresponder, or some other reliable method of bulk emailing subscribers.

It’s important you don’t send bulk emails to your newsletter subscribers from your own email address or your own domain for a couple of reasons. One is that if you get a spam complaint, your webhosting company may close down your account and ask questions later.

Another  is that you have to handle any problems with the autoresponder setup yourself, and unless you’re into the technical side of things, that can be tricky.

Yet a third is that if your list grows too big for your own autoresponder, and you have to transfer it to a service such as Getresponse at a later date, you’ll need to ask all your listmembers to resubscribe, and you may lose a number of them.

It’s much easier to sign up with a professional autoresponder service from the start. I personally use Getresponse, there’s a small monthly charge to set up an unlimited number of mailing lists, and I’ve found it very straightforward to set up. I won’t go into detail about the setup because there are videos on the Getresponse site which explain it better than I could. You can also try it out with a free account before you start investing $$ in the service.

How do you find people to subscribe to your mailing list? A simple method is to set up a sales page (did I mention you could do this with WordPress!) and offer a free report to download in exchange for subscribing. The report could be something you have private label rights to, or one you’ve written yourself. Either way, make it a quality product. Getresponse will provide you with the code to create a neat little signup box on your site.

When you have your list, you can pre-add messages into your autoresponder, and set them up to be mailed out in a particular order after a new subscriber signs up, so the process is on autopilot. You can also send out a broadcast email at any time, if you have something urgent to share.

So, how do you monetize a mailing list? There are a couple of options. One is you can occasionally send a message with information about a suitable affiliate product, and make commission from any sales. Or, you could offer your own product for sale. A third option is, if your list is big enough, you may be able to sell advertising on it to someone promoting another product.

It’s really important when you’ve built your list, that you work hard to maintain the relationship, and keep your credibility intact. Respect the privacy of your list members; don’t sell or give away their email addresses. Only promote products you are happy to recommend, and make  sure you don’t sell advertising for products you’re not comfortable with.

It also goes without saying that any products you promote should be closely targeted to your niche, otherwise your sales are likely to be dismal.

Maintaining an email list is a great way of building residual income, however, as with any online business, you need to maintain traffic flow to your site.

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