my first sale - trying to make it better and earn more money!

I wanted to say first that I have been a viewer (and occassional poster) on this forum for over a year. I greatly appreciate the wealth of information on this forum and the depth of knowledge and eagerness to help. I have learned many things that I have tried to put into practice in my own web based business.

I made my first real sale (commission) today ($3,000) using internet marketing my main tool and weapon.

I am super psyched as I have been working on this for over a year with no sales to date.

I started out a few months back and built a simple blog about what all is going on in real estate: Lang and Thomas - Real Estate Blog

The purpose of the blog is that I could write real estate articles, become recognized as someone with credibility in the market place and to build a list of names for future selling (information products, affiliate sales, etc.). To date I have over 350 names on my list and it is growing slowly.

I have continued to do some affliliate sales on my site but have not been able to crack to code to make any money as of yet (any suggestions are welcome. Over time I found out (thru feedback) that a few of the subscribers on my list wanted to look at and purchase real estate deals. So I found some real estate deals (ie; duplexes) and sent out an email burst to my list. I got feedback almost immediately and also had more people wanting to be added to the list (I posted to other website forums that I had deals and to email me if interested).

Within two weeks I had a buyer sitting at closing (today) and ended up making a $3,000 commission (along with my business partner, so $1500 split).

I am really excited about this as I did this all after hours on my day job while I was working at night and weekends.

my question is... how can I improve on this system so that I can make it better and make more money in the coming months. I can envision making $50k in the next year but obviously need to improve on my system.

One idea is to create a deals page with all of our deals listed which we have done here:
Deals

it is under construction (and a reason why I am asking for help and feedback). From that page other investors could add their emails to the list to get more info. I also want to create a web "squeeze page" so that other sellers could type in their info about the property they want to sell. That way I could build up a bigger buyers list and also improve my sellers list.

If I have a bigger list (more buyers) and more sellers -- I can put together more deals and earn more commissions.

Any suggestions would be helpful and gratefully received. Thanks for your help.