Make List Creation One of Your Core Businesses

Most affiliate marketers take a very haphazard approach to their marketing effort. Many don't even bother to build lists of prospects, and rely on poorly constructed and targeted online efforts to create and sustain sales. In contrast, successful super affiliates know the importance of list building, and make list building one of their core businesses.

Building a list of prospects - and establishing a relationship with those prospects - is the super affiliate's secret tool to success. Studies have shown that people buy from those they know and trust, and that most sales are not made upon first exposure t a product offer. Most sales happen after at least 5-6 marketing efforts on the seller's part.

Thus, most beginners lose sales by not establishing a method of communicating to their audience. They don't make an effort to figure out who their prospects are, nor to they try to gather a prospect's information via email opt-in, which is the easiest way of accomplishing this task.

Using an email opt-in system powered by an autoresponder is an extremely powerful tool for marketing to your prospects. Create an account with an autoresponder service such as AWeber and create a series of 5-6 emails to add to your autoresponder queue offering your prospect information and bonuses which you do not offer to your website viewers.

After 5-6 emails, your prospects have gotten to know you, and you have provided them with a good deal of value which they would not have gotten otherwise. At this stage, they are much more like to purchase for you. This is when you begin to offer affiliate products to them.

This method is extremely effective. Every Internet marketer uses this method - no exceptions - to generate massive sales. They can literally 'print money legally' by marketing to their base when they need to generate sales, as their base knows them, trusts their recommendations, and therefore buys at a much higher percentage than first-time visitors.

So, if you haven't yet created an email opt-in method on your website to gather prospects in your niche, consider doing so. Your sales will improve, and so will your online success.

Sebastian Schepis is an Internet Affiliate Marketer with a technical programming and SEO background. Read his blog on SEO, Affiliate Marketing, and Internet Marketing for tips and tricks as well as code examples and handy scripts.