Below, you will find an unedited excerpt from my new book about building Internet-based businesses, Online Business from Scratch. To receive updates about the book, visit www.fromscratchbook.com.
Your email list can be an incredibly powerful way to generate revenue from your audience. After you have built a sizable email list, you may find that you make more money by selling ads against your email list and promoting your own products to your email list than you earn from the ads on your actual website. There are several ways to monetize your email list, but the four most effective strategies are promoting your own products, promoting other people’s products as an affiliate, working with an email advertising agency to send emails to your list on behalf of advertisers and putting co-registration ads in your email sign-up process.
Whenever you launch a product, you should send a series of emails to your list about your product. Jeff Walker’s book, Launch, offers great ideas about how to use your email list to promote a product launch. You can also periodically re-launch products or offer discounts to drum up sales for your products. If you don’t have anything to promote, you can find offers on an affiliate network and use the same type of content to promote other people’s products in exchange for an affiliate commission on each sale that you generate. You won’t have much success promoting products that are outside of your niche, but you can do very well when promoting a service that’s relevant to your audience and especially when subscribers get a special discount or bonus for using your link.
Just as you can make money on your website by running display ads for a network like Google AdSense, you can also generate revenue by selling ads against your email list. Selling ads against your email list is a great long-term strategy when your list grows in size, but it’s difficult to do when you don’t have much of a list. Once you get to about 25,000 subscribers, you should start looking at how to find advertisers that might pay to email your mailing list. It might be far-fetched to think that you will one day have an email list that large, but remember that list growth is cumulative. If you can attract 1,000 new opt-ins every month, you’ll have 25,000 subscribers after two years.
Email advertising is a media that is primarily sold directly to advertisers and through niche advertising agencies focus on specific industries. There are no big ad networks that will work with just anyone to monetize their email list. You have to establish a relationship with an agency that sells email advertising on behalf of your niche or make direct deals with advertisers. While setting up email advertising relationships isn’t the easiest thing to do, they can be incredibly lucrative. Some advertisers are willing to pay as much as much as $50.00 per thousand people on your mailing list to send a single email message. If you have a list of 20,000 subscribers, you just made $1,000.00 by sending a single email to your list on behalf of an advertiser.
Co-Registration Advertising
You can also monetize the thank you page that your readers see after they sign-up for your mailing list with a co-registration advertising unit. When a user signs up for your mailing list, they will be presented with a list of additional offers that they can also choose to opt-in to. If a new subscriber selects any of the offers listed, you’ll receive a small commission from the advertiser and the subscriber’s name and email address will automatically be passed on to the advertiser. The amount of money that you will make from co-registration advertising will vary depending on the niche of your mailing list and the number of people that sign-up for your email list on your website every month. For lower-value and general-interest mailing lists, you might be able to make an average of $0.15-$0.25 for every new subscriber that sees your co-registration advertising unit. For some specific niches, like finance and investing, publishers make between $0.50 and $1.00 for every subscriber that sees their co-registration advertising unit.
There are a handful of companies that run co-registration ad networks, including After Offers (www.afteroffers.com), CoregMedia (www.coregmedia.com), Investing Media Solutions (www.investingmediasolutions.com), Opt-Intelligence (www.optingelligence.com), and Tiburon Media (www.tiburonmedia.com). I personally run co-registration units from After Offers and Investing Media Solutions on MarketBeat and on my personal website.