List bulding OR Affiliate marketing(paid traffic) ?

I run both, naviown, and I can tell you that both work pretty much equally well, in fact in many cases you'll find that the two models become one model. One of the ways I like to do it is this: Squeeze, sales funnel monetized with CPA offers, traffic driven from PPC and media buys. A quick model to get earning lickety-split when you know what you're doing. If you're new at this, though, I'd recommend being prudent and protecting your money. Start out with free traffic sources. Get your website platform earning and then reinvest part or all of the proceeds into paid traffic. It's a safe way of doing things.

Best of luck!

Cheers - Tom

Both, they go hand in hand.

I would recommend going for both. Use a squeeze page to build a list and promote your affiliate links to your subscribers.

This is one of the more sustainable methods around as it helps you to keep your clients in reach should you have any future offers you want to promote to them.

It depends on which strategy works for your business. You cannot say a strategy is better than the other since both can work well. You need to test these strategies to your business/website and see which one works for you. And I agree with the above comments that you can use both strategies too

Paid traffic > squeeze page to build your list > once they are on your list you can promote cpa offers or whatever you want

paid traffic > cpa offers = NO asset

When your paid traffic source changes rules, bans you, increases pricing you can still drive traffic to your cpa offers via your list. Your list is like having your own traffic source where you have more control over.

You know the best thing is list building in my opinion.

Don't think if you are just going to get paid traffic to an offer they will buy. Most of the time they don't... only if you come across hot buyers.

If you work around the strategy of building your list is your main focus... but whilst you are building your list you are also promoting some type of offer as an affiliate you are providing a solution to some one's problem and also you are building your list.

Building your list is so important in your online business because those people will be your community who will build a relationship with you, trust you and spend money with you.

if you want to bounce some ideas off me... just send me a message and we can chat further

Cheers

Tiff

Consider me a newbie. I am in a coaching program right now. My coach has me doing both. For traffic, he has me doing one free and one paid. This is starting from zero. No list.

Free=Forum posting 2-3 postings on 2-3 forums per day. This one has not yet produced any traffic.Began on August 4th

Paid=Solo Ads. Ran 4 Solo Ad Campaigns with different SA providers, 100 clicks each. Resulted in 167 subscribers to date. 41.75% opt-in. Began Saturday, August 15th. Had some sales. Waiting for autoresponder to process further sales. Waiting for campaigns to get done so we can see if we need to tweak for higher conversion.

So the Solo Ads of course got results faster.

Leilani

Yes , I agree that having a list is like asset. But it's hard to scale some campaigns like with paid traffic.

If you're doing affiliate marketing -- whether it's with paid or free traffic -- you should be building a list.

Joey

I've been in IM for just about a year and to start off first, list building is easier and to me, the more natural way to start. If you have nothing to begin with, just start with blogging an putting a capture/squeeze page on your blog to offer visitors a chance to get free updates to your newsletter or giveaway a free-ebook.

it can be in any niche...build you own true followers (e.g. how to cope with cancer or dog training) and they will stay with you...subsequently you can promote any other relevant affiliate offers.

hope this helps...

phoebe

i use both.
we've known people just wanna buy from people who they know/trust... so we need listbuilding to build relationship.
so what product we'll offer to our client...that's own product or as affiliate.
go listbuilding first then do as affiliate marketer

To put it simply you want to be doing both. I say this because first by creating your own custom landing page with your own free gift or on the spot problem solver you can increase your conversions extremely.

Second the whole idea behind email is you have the traffic source right there with just the click of the send button. Powerful and fast. I can send an email to my list promoting an affiliate offer and see commissions come in literally within minutes sometimes!

Plus it's fun communication with your list and sharing stuff and getting the replies and questions back and most importantly seeing "i just made a sale" Thats awesome stuff

Why not both? Send the paid traffic to a capture page, and then send them emails about the affiliate product you want to promote.

I would Recommend Link Building more than Affiliate marketing. Its simple if you need some specific types of audience for your website then you should go for Affiliate but if you are looking random user from google searches then go with Link Building to get High Pr and Domain authority.

You should go for both .

I say both... Of course you always hear the money is in the list, and it is. I try to spread out my income sources to give me multiple streams of income in case one source takes a dump. Look what happened to all those people who spent hundreds, thousands of dollars to add like in FB. And now you have 85K followers on your Yorkie puppy page and you post to your people and Facebook may only show it to 5% of your group.
Spread it out, get it automated as much as possible, move on and focus on a new project for a while, then go back to your other project, evaluate how it's doing and tweek accordingly.

If you need a stable income, then i would suggest you to go for List building. It will be a bit slow in the first, but in long run it will be worth.

Because, being in the field of paid traffic, i need to be running all the time and is sooo competitive, some times you loose money, some times you gain, sometimes too many competitors, some times your traffic doesn't work well for specific offers.

You need to be testing all the time...

Few months ago, i bought solo emails from a provider, and he owns a list size of 2 Million people. And that really is a gold mine for him. I alone paid $2.5 CPM for his list of 2M solo emails.

And there are dozens of people who buy from him continuously and moreover his list is soo responsive and so buyers are always buying from him. If i had to book a slot, i need to wait atleast two months to have my slot booked.

Now, i am feeling soo bad for not building a list.

So, better don't leave list building at all.

You should do list building with whatever you're selling. I don't care if you're selling rockets... or airplanes. What guy out of the blue would see a grocery store, hear details about it, hear income figures... and then buy it right then and there? The guy would know nothing about the neighborhood, demographics, crime rate, location, or anything.

Selling affiliate products VIA list building is the best way to go in my opinion. This is not always possible with most affiliate programs. So pick a high profit affiliate program that allows for this marketing model, and go out and make sales for it.

Both will work absolutely fantastic way

If you don't build a list you are pretty much wasting your time. If you build a list you own the traffic and can send it wherever you want and it won't cost you a dime. You can also follow up with that list, targeting non buyers and sell just as many products as you did up front with your paid ad if you do it right.

Traffic > Squeeze Page > Follow Up Messages (Educational + Affiliate Offers) > Sales Page > Make a Sale

thanks for the great answers !
You guys not afraid to get banned for some stupid reasons from autoresponder like aweber or getresponse?

You don't think that all people who building lists are in risk to get banned and the list will be gone ?

I would recommend going for both.

Agree => Both, they go hand in hand.

many people get $3K per month or more by giving profits to other people ( no internet marketing and no selling)