Email list question

It is completely up to you how you choose to monetize your list. Never sell the email addresses because like you said, it violates their trust. What you can do is promote other products in your niche and every time you make a sale, you get an affiliate commission. You would have to do your due diligence to see which products convert better/are quality products to promote, but once you find one that complements your service, you are set.

The reason why people are advocating building an email list is because you do have that ability to gain a relationship with your customer. They trusted you with their email to begin with, you obviously offered them something they were interested in. So with that knowledge, you can promote other similar offers and they wouldn't mind. And by having their emails, you can continuously promote multiple offers/products to your list without having to pay for new customers.

You can also create your own products and sell it to your list. Let's say you create a video series of softball training. Sell it for "x" dollars, now you have an audience to market it to at your fingertips.

You can sell solo ads. Read up on that if you need to know what it is, but I doubt it is in high demand in your niche.

Bottom line is there are many things you can do with a list. The key is to build a relationship with them so they are more incline to trust your recommendations. Look at it this way, if you have the users.. why not get them engaged? Why let them visit your site and leave with no way of getting in contact with them in the future. Hope that helped.

Congratulations on being here! (I was new too, but it was 7 years ago )

Let me explain about an email list. You need a service that will provide and autoresponder to you. (I'll IM a link to you to one of the best - and it's on short duration special right now at 80% off!)

This service will provide you with a ' capture form' you can put on your site so that readers can subscribe to to an informational email newsletter from you.

You then form a relationship with those subscribers by email and, guess what? People buy from people they know, like and trust.

You are then in a position to, occasionally, offer them affiliate products that relate to their interests.

Email lists can be very! profitable.