Email Marketing for A Small Site

I completely agree with you, Alan. Adding huge amounts of content, for your purposes, won't correlate at all with increased income.

Absolutely right.

Why would you want to write a "sales page", if you're an affiliate? I don't understand this perspective at all. Affiliates don't need sales pages. Our job isn't to sell the products. It's to supply targeted traffic (with whom we've built a trust-based relationship) to the vendor's sales page.

That's honestly 3 sales more than I'd have predicted, from what you've done.

Clearly.

And in any case, SEO traffic is almost certainly about the worst you can have, for this purpose. (Especially in a niche like that.) I always suggest to people that they shouldn't put time and effort into trying to attract SEO traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic, in every single one of my niches, has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings for multiple keywords happen to be a minor side-benefit of the main targeted traffic-generation method I use) but I'd hate to have to make a living just from that traffic. If you have a good look round the forum, you'll also see plenty of other Warriors making exactly this point.

10 pages is a lot more than any of my ClickBank affiliate sites start off with.

The size of the site has nothing to do with how you structure the email campaign at all.

This is your "real issue".

Absolutely no disrespect implied at all, but I think that at the moment you're making some assumptions (about email marketing and list-building and how they relate to your site) that successful email marketers wouldn't share at all.

There's plenty of information here which can help you in this regard, but it's probably best to start by acknowledging that there's some real "learning-curve" ahead of you.

Suggestions follow, for starting/to get yourself oriented.

This sets out the essentials of list-building for making ClickBank affiliate sales: What are the essential things to know about list building?

This suggests when and how often to recommend a product, among the valuable and trust-generating niche-related information you supply to your subscribers: Lists: How Long to Presell - Averages

This offers comments on the sort of opt-in page likely to produce the most monetizable list (don't imagine that that's going to be the same as "the biggest list": that will almost never be the case): Website or squeeze page

This explains perhaps the single most important stage of all :exactly what you give your visitors in exchange for their email addresses is what determines the extent to which you successfully monetize the email series so that your subscribers await and expect and welcome and open and pay attention to your emails.

This explains why an automated series of emails is likely to be overwhelmingly better than sending "broadcasts": Autoresponders vs. Broadcasts

And this explains why you might want to be very careful indeed about taking advice from people who promote themselves as "gurus" and sell email-marketing-related information/guidebooks/WSO's/whatever: Sick of Emails Not Being Opened?

That's for sure! It's like trying to run the bath by opening the taps fully without bothering to plug in the hole first: you'd just lose all the water.

To earn significant money from affiliate marketing, you need to do three things ...

(i) Keep your potential customers returning to the sales page (because not so many people buy anthing much at their first visit to a sales page!);

(ii) Make increasing sales (ideally at progressively higher prices) to the same "captive audience" who regularly rely on and trust your recommendations;

(iii) Establish the credibility and trust necessary to do both the above by earning's people respect as a provider of niche-related information.

Without building lists, of course, you can't do any of the three and you'd just be throwing away almost all the traffic you ever generate that doesn't buy anything immediately - and as you've already discovered, that's almost all of it.

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I sold clickbank products having just a salesletter and a blog attached to it. I drove traffic via SEO, they read the salesletter and they buy. The blog actually wasn't needed.

So your strategy is like trying to make something complicated work - salesletters sell digital products not articles. Articles get people interested but they don't sell.

So the site with articles is a good way to get them to your list, putting the optin box at bottom of every article. Then like you said use emails to sell the products (what emails do isn't actually selling but just getting them interested enough to click on the email links - the selling is done by the affiliate salesletter).

I would provide them useful information and direct linking to the affiliate salesletter, let it do the selling. Don't drive traffic from emails to articles and then hope they click through aff link and then to salesletter and then buy - it's like you just guessed wrong.

As an affiliate I also had a 7-10 follow up series each with something informative, and at the end of the series an email specifically to promote a product... it worked well, the product solved exactly the problem my subscribers where facing - so a random product won't work.

The product was also quite unique at the time and solved a particular problem I was talking about in my emails, everything has to fit-in nicely.

I have few health niche lists each targeting one health topic. Each one is small like around 2000 subscribers in each. But I get reasonable number of sales from these few lists. I only send ecourses to them with affiliate links and few broadcasts. Nothing more.

So wasting traffic without funneling them into your email marketing is waste of resources. So by all means, go ahead and start list building.

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Before building a list, because everyone else here seems to have gone over that already, I recommend you to make sure you write up all your follow up emails that you can use to automatically follow up with those subscribers for at least 6 months. Getting subscribers are easy, but writing follow up emails are usually a challenge for me in my opinion,

Hello Alan,
Like someone already said start to develop some Follow Ups ( if you do pursue Email Marketing which you should). Start out and do at least 10. That will get you a good start.

Write about some personal experiences you have had with dating and women. Learn to be a good storyteller.

You can also cross sell with other products after awhile (weight loss, men's libido market etc...). But then again you may want to stick with two products and go on your way to creating more micro-niche sites.

That is up to you.

With some Sales, you sound like you have something that has "Pull". The fact is those Products selling on your Site like that is a good indication that if you have effective Follow Ups these people will really buy .....possibly again and again.

Start capturing those names and especially those Buyers and build a Buyers List

Good luck !


-Robert Andrew

As always, Alexa has given you some great links. I suggest after you're don reading them you head off to youtube and listen to some experts speaking about the subject. Just give it an hour everyday and start marketing through your emails.
Don't expect things to jump off as soon as you start, because these things do take time. Just be persistent and keep adding value to your customers. With experience you'll start getting the hang of things, and naturally your sales will increase. One thing that I can't emphasize enough is deliverability.
Keep testing the deliverablity of your emails from time to time. If you're emails are being delivered and read, then things are good. If they're not then this is a signal that your strategy needs a change!

Which SMTP you are using to send bulk mail?