What's the best way for a newbie to monetize a new list?

Own product!, full commissions at your side. no third party.

The point of having a list is to be able to communicate with people over time to woo them into buying something from you. It is commonly said that you need to approach someone 5 times before they will buy from you.

So from that angle you want to have a brand and be consistently providing value. I think you should develop your own product but maybe you could start off promoting other products that you believe in and that are consistent with your brand. The consistency and congruency is key.

My usual method: 3 informative emails followed by 1product sale(must be relevant from the informative emails.

In the past few years, this is what I learned about email marketing as related to your question:

To succeed, you need to have both. When you are just starting out I would recommend any newbie to send emails to their list with affiliate programs that others have created. It can be very overwhelming for someone new to produce their own product.

After you made a good amount of sales and got the hang of it, then you can start to create your own.

Plus, there is nothing wrong with promoting both to your list at the same time.

And last, if you are just starting out, find affiliate programs that can pay you higher then normal commissions. Instead of finding products that pay you a $15 commission, you would be better off to promote programs that can bank you up to $300 per customer.

You are not going to make more sales with programs that costs less money for the customer. If you can solve someone's problem and offer them a high ticket item, you would be surprised at how many people will open their credit card and buy.

Hi BarbarShop,

I would suggest that you monetize a new list with some kind of low cost affiliate product that relates to your niche, more specifically, an affiliate product that has recurring billing built into it.

Regardless of how you're building your list, it always a good idea to monetize your list as quickly as possible by putting a low cost OTO (one time offer) right after the freebie that your offering, then up-sell into a membership of some sort.

So for example: say your giving a way a free report or ebook. Right after a subscriber signs up for your freebie, directly after it there would be a low cost OTO between $7 to $39. Of course, the OTO should be related to your freebie offer, maybe a video or mini video series that goes into deeper detail about a specific topic covered in your freebie report.

Having a OTO like this is great for quickly recouping costs that may have been spent on paid advertising. And it's also great for getting instant money into your pocket that you can put right back into your marketing/advertising efforts to scale up.

I would suggest that your OTO use a payment merchant that's instant, like paypal. This way you have instant access to the funds and can put it to use immediately. You can find affiliate programs that have instant payments on sites like JVZOO.com.

After you have your OTO, I suggest your next upsell be a membership site, between $17 to $39/mth. This is a great way to build consistent, residual income in your business and get long-term returns for your efforts.

You can even take the membership site concept a step further by actually placing your freebie offer inside of a "free members area" of your membership site. This will increase the perceived value of your content and increase your chances of turning your free subscriber into a paid customer/member of your site.

This is also a good way to activate other monetization streams by putting internal ads inside of your membership site that promote other affiliate products and ads that promote the paid subscription level of your site.

The possibilities are endless with a membership monetization model, and there's even more profit funnels that you could implement using this model.

Does this help you?? Let me know if you have any further questions.

Ti

I would attempt creating your own product as soon as possible. Your first product might not be great- but it might not be great next week or next year.. you're going to have to learn the process sometime.

Get feedback from your first few customers- they'll be pretty honest with you, especially if it's just missing the mark somehow. Then keep improving it.