Every guru will tell you that to make serious money online, you need to have a list. Sure you can make money as an affiliate, promoting other peoples products, but for the majority of people the amount of money you make in this way is not really worth all the effort. Not enough for a good night out, let alone enough to give up the day job.
When you think about it, it makes sense though, if you have a list, that people have opted in to, they are interested in what you have to offer so when you contact them with similar related products there is a far higher chance they will buy from you again. More so than "surfers" who click your Google ad and never buy anything you have to offer. With a list, your customers are targeted thus increasing your chances of making a sale while not having to pay for any money consuming adverts.
You would obviously need to build your list first but once you have it up and running you will be able to set it up to run more or less on autopilot instead of constantly needed to check ad campaigns etc to see how they are performing. If you can, over time, build a list of 10,000 people, every time you set up you auto responder for this particular niche, you will instantly have 10,000 potential customers at the click of a few buttons.
The benefits of having a list or lists are huge especially if you can build a responsive list for a few different niches. If you have a website and want to make money you should have some kind of opt-in box on the site so that you can begin to build for the future. If you don't have an opt-in you are missing a great opportunity.
Imagine all those people visiting your website on a daily basis. Now imagine you could offer every single one of them the chance to find out about the "next best thing" every few days. As most have visited your website as they are genuinely interested in the content of your site the chances are of most of them would be at least interested in finding out about the "next best thing" and joining your mailing list. This then gives you the opportunity to use that interest to your advantage. Set up a series of auto pilot emails to make the potential customers aware of the new product and at the same time each email will make product seem more and more appealing. The potential for sales is massive.
You don't necessarily need to have a website to tap into the huge potential of list building but having one with no opt-in box is a waste. It doesn't need to be one of the annoying pop-up boxes, a simple box in the side panel will do. You don't want to force people to opt-in, you want them to do it because they want to. This will produce a far more responsive list, meaning more sales for you.
