OK, so you put up a website and you’ve posted good strong content on it.

You’ve focused your content on your target market with laser precision, giving them good reasons to trust and believe in who you are and what you say.

You’re putting articles on your website and posting them on the web, and you’re trying to bring people in your niche over to your website through a variety of marketing methods, carefully checking to see what works the best.

Your next step is to build a good strong high quality email list. And it definitely doesn’t have to be a HUGE list. As long as you have laser targeted your market, your list can be as small as a few hundred people.

This is called email marketing.

E-mail Marketing

If they see you as the respected and trusted leader in your field—thanks to the good content they get from you, most of which is free—then they will, at least from time to time, buy things from you.

Now, most of last century’s marketers always used to say: “The money is in the list.” And that is absolutely correct.

A tremendously powerful traffic and income generating tactic is to bring people to your website over and over again via a good list. These are your repeat visitors, the people who look at you as the trusted source in your industry, and who will continuously buy from you again and again and again, happily ever after, as long as you keep providing high value products.

These people come to your site because they’ve already seen you before, and they’ve found valuable content there in the past and they’re looking for some more.

So, besides the fact that “the money is in the list,” even more important, the money is really in your RELATIONSHIP to your list. You can’t build a list of people who you regularly SPAM, because that won’t work at all. They’ll hate your guts, and rightfully so.

What you have to do is build a list via a process that’s called “opt-in” email marketing.

This is a tremendously powerful secret weapon that many big name marketers are trying desperately to hide form the general public. Why?

Because it’s so explosively effective that if word ever got out about it, it may dilute its effectiveness, they fear.

E-MAIL MARKETING STEP #1: 
It starts out by you giving away something free on your website. It’s that simple. All you have to do is give away something that people in your niche will want.

Let’s say you create a nice product—a cookbook, an E-book on how to swing golf clubs—whatever your niche would want to read or see.

My advice is to create a product that provides them with free valuable help and quality information on whatever subject they were looking to you for help with in the first place.

E-MAIL MARKETING STEP #2:
Offer your professional and high-quality product to everyone who visits your site for free. However—and this is important—you have to give this freebie away only to those people who “opt-in” to your newsletter.

That means you’ll be “capturing” their NAMES and EMAIL addresses. In other words, they must be required to enter their first name and email address in the space provided and then hit the SUBMIT button, in order to claim their freebie.

E-MAIL MARKETING STEP #3:
Once they have filled in their name and Email addresses, they are then subscribed to your “list.” Once you have a list, you can send out emails to the people on that list saying things you know will get them excited.

By sending out emails to people who have requested FREE information from you, what you are now doing is forming relationships with your best prospects, which is much more valuable than most newbie online businesses realize.

Your prewritten emails will then be delivered to your prospects at whatever periodic intervals you choose.

It will address them by first name and many people on your list will actually believe you’re emailing them a personal message! It's a powerful idea and it works wonders.

After you complete the initial setup work—a pre-written series of personalized and scheduled email messages—everything from then on is completely automated, which is the best part about this strategy.

The technology behind this is called a follow-up email “auto responder service.” We prefer to use Aweber.com and some people recommend ConstantConatct.com or Getresponse.com. There are many services available. You’ll be taking advantage of a technology that can automate and empower your relationship building.

When used properly, and with a bit of originality and flare, this email marketing strategy that sends out a series of messages builds your relationship with your list. By contacting prospects at set intervals over a period of three months, you can start selling your products to the people on your list, and you’ll be making money online before you know it.

Your Affiliates

One or some of the pre-written messages you could send out may be a call for affiliates. It’s easy to do. Just ask your customers who enjoyed your product or service to help you sell it in exchange for a healthy share of the profits.

That’s all there is to it! Provide your customers with a good product and a way to make good money selling that product and they will do all your selling for you—and that’s all affiliate marketing is.

Anybody can do it. And you can too. In fact, you’ve probably done it before without even realizing it. Don’t you remember selling lemonade in front of your house when you were a kid? Remember sending your little brother or sister around town to get all the kids excited about your lemonade offering?—And at the cool price of a dime a cup?

Well, you probably didn’t realize it at the time, but by paying him/her a small share of the extra sales you made, you were sending him or her out as your affiliate marketer.

Affiliate marketing online today is no different, except it's covered in high technology and Internet jargon. It’s the fastest-growing and most powerfully significant way to punch up your sales.

Here’s the quick rundown:

First: You have a product or service you wish to sell. Your goal is to get other website owners to sell your product/service for you. You want them to become your "affiliates."

Second: You ask all of these potential affiliates (who are often called "publishers") to create a link on their website that you have pre-approved, allowing their visitors to “hyperlink” to your Website.

Third: You pay your affiliates money (usually at the end of each month) either every time a visitor to their site “clicks-through” to your site, “opts-in” for more information on your site, or “purchases” something from your site. It all depends on the arrangement you create in order to entice affiliate marketers to help you sell your products and services.

Advanced software keeps track of the whole thing.

Amazon.com has affiliate programs and so does National Geographic. They have found what hundreds of thousands of affiliate marketing pros have already known—that affiliate marketing is a powerful and cost-effective method of turning existing customers into a sales force or marketing arm, willing to market and sell their products/services for them.

Affiliate marketing is one of the main reasons so many people are, for example, becoming bloggers.

They're putting up highly personal Web sites in hopes of attracting a unique audience that they can then expose to high-commission advertising (selling products/services on behalf of the marketers with whom they're affiliated).
That’s why this type of marketing is called "pay for performance.”

It’s totally different from “traditional advertising” where you buy an ad in a newspaper and hope for the best. Affiliate marketing fees are generally based on whether or not your affiliate makes a sale.

You can set your payout to your affiliate marketers based on a number of factors, including:

• Cost-per-sale
  
• Cost-per-click
  
• Cost-per-action
  
• Cost-per-lead

To find a list of products you can sell as an affiliate marketer yourself, or to find people who may be willing to sell your products and services, go to Clickbank.com or try CommissionJunction.com or Hydranetwork.com.

These and other affiliate marketing networks help with everything from tracking referrals to writing monthly checks for each and every affiliate in their system.

They answer affiliates' technical support questions on the intricacies of Web-based affiliate marketing, and they can even help with placing advertising banners on websites.

New software has been created so that affiliate marketing can be handled in-house, too. AffiliateGuerrilla and AffiliateShop, for example, allows your company to sign up and manage a high volume of marketing affiliates without the help of an external affiliate manager.

Doing this allows you to bypass normal compensation programs offered by the networks.

You can write your own contract and create your own rules about how the affiliate marketing program will operate.

You’ll also save on commissions, since there's no middle-man between you and your affiliates and vice versa.

WARNING: It’s important to keep in mind that cheaters are out there. Affiliate marketing is not a perfect system, so make sure you do your research and find out the pros and cons.

For example, some affiliates have been found to click repeatedly on their own website’s ads just for the few pennies they earn from each click.

The advertiser is then fooled into believing that he or she is getting tremendous traffic to their website, when this isn’t the case.

Create an affiliate marketing program that you and your affiliates can feel comfortable with or that you and your advertiser (if you are an affiliate) feel confident with.