Making money without a list?

Even though list building can be very lucrative, the real fortune is in building a list of buyers.

Building a list of buyers will secure your future in this niche. Selling to people
that have bought form you before is easier than selling to strangers. You'll find
that your list of customers is also more responsive to affiliate programs you
promote to them.

Hope this helps

Dann

Yes, I have several sites that don't rely on list building as their primary source of income.

These tend to be information sites that answer a very specific question. Often, they only get a handful of daily visitors due to being in a rather narrow niche, and creating the necessary content for a giveaway and/or autoresponder series wouldn't deliver the desired ROI.

Instead, these sites typically make their money from one-off affiliate sales.

However, some of them grow from this kind of website to seeing greater amounts of traffic, so I have in the past reconsidered and focused more on list building as they have grown.

I would much rather rely on a list of buyers to have a more stable business model but it would be interesting to see other peoples views.

There's still tonnes of sales to be made from fresh traffic your just crazy not to also incorporate a list into your strategy in my opinion. They're just so useful.

You can have a large network of sites ranking very nicely in the SE's and pull in plenty of money from that network. However, you are still missing out on another income stream that is fairly simple to implement and doesn't take long to maintain as well. So yeah, you can make plenty of money, but why not incorporate something else that can easily bring you more money?

On one of my sites I'm making money from mostly new visits, I have set up email sign up via RSS but I haven't gone to the bother of list building with this particular site due to time constraints (I plan to eventually though).

I really don't make as much money from this site as I should because as I rely on traffic from organic search I mostly get new visitors (apart from those via RSS or social networks) which doesn't enable me to build a relationship with the user.

because it's all about the relationship (which is why I plan to start list building as soon as I get round to it on this site).

So really you can make money without list building .. you just won't build as much.

In my opinion you must have a list to earn a good amount ..

A list isn't just for "repeat customers": it's also for the other 90% of customers for an "initial sale" whom you can't normally sell to as "fresh traffic" and will lose altogether without list-building. (If you're looking at affiliate sales, that is).

from all i've learnt and seen on this forum, list building seems the be most proven way to set up an affiliate campaign and make money consistently

You DON'T need a list to make money online consistently! What you do need is steady flow of good traffic

Should you be list building consistently in any niche your in. YES!

I couldnt agree more with what the previous posters have said, the key is in the list but i have to add that there is no point in add a list if you have a adsense monetised micro niche. It would take forever to build up any form of sizeable list.

List building is not the only way of making money online, but is certainly one of the best and proven ways.

Not to repeat the benefits that other posters have stated, I'll just say that there is no good reason why you
SHOULDN'T build your list, and huge number of reasons why you SHOULD build a list.

You can drive people to your sales letter page and get orders, which will help to build your backend list. They will unsubscribe wayy less than free leads that you generate with a free ebook. 80% of your business profits will come from backend sales - so your buyer list will be the most important list you will build. But making money without a list is easy just by sending people straight to your sales letter page.

Only the government can make money.

This is what i believe:

case study 1
Let's say you are promoting an affiliate product that pays you $20/sale, and you make 1 sale by sending 100 target traffic to the product site

case study 2
if you have a list of 100 prospect who have already downloaded your free report which is closely related to the affiliate product you are promoting, you could make 5 sales by recommending and pre-selling the product via email

conclusion
case study 1 results in a total sale of $20
case study 2 results in a total sale of $100

Yes you can, but why would anyone want to? No, seriously! Is it the recurring expense? Or the promoting? Ot taking too much time away from what you do best? Or something else entirely?

I've got a collegian who's been whipping up adsense websites at the rate of roughly two per week since last June. The income varies wildly on each from zero to 150/month, but with scores of them she's happy. She likes doing the keyword research and putting the website together, but doesn't want a long-term commitment to "add fresh content" and has no more use for the Google mazurka than I. However, over spring break she did admit that she's become seriously interested in a couple of those keywords, and plans to split this summer adding more websites and possibly dabbling in a little curation on at least one.

I could also give you examples of people doing membership sites without a list, and others ittle more than the basic 7 page promo for their Kindle book.

Still, in most niches a list is going to be the better choice - allowing you to develop long-term, lasting relationships with your prospects who become buyers, then repeat buyers, and maybe even huge fans.

I guess it depends on what you consider "decent money". Got a specific figure in mind?