Does anyone even make money online without an email list?

I don't think you have to have a list. I think it depends what you do. For example if you have an online store set up, a blog that is informative and keeps people coming back for more, or a product review site that gets lots of hits, then I think you can make money without a list. That being said, a list would not hurt your profits.

Does anyone? Well start with yourself...I hope you're not affiliate marketing 1,000 products and not making money :p

But seriously, a list isn't needed but isn't hard to implement even if it isn't utilized properly.

~SW

I do know of people who are making a living by providing services and by doing the direct linking method. It is possible but it make more sense to build a list as it is more stable.

Promoting over 1000 products without list..?
You're leaving lots of money on the table. That's for sure.

Meharis

Let's say you've been an affiliate marketer for 3 years and have promote 1000 products, that's still less that one product per day. Remember, you aren't promoting all of them at the same time

I personally wouldn't suggest to anyone not to build a list but it obviously works for you and plenty other people I would assume.

Start and build a list it is really pretty silly not too.

Even if you only use it to promote your newest blog posts, or product offers you will make a lot more money with an email list than without one.

I've made thousands online without a list and still do each week.
I had a list at one time, but I found people hardly opened emails after a while.
Also I got many freebie seekers at the time as I gave a lot of free stuff like pdf's and videos each week.
I removed the list some years ago and the sales keep coming.

Yes, very much so. Almost all of them. I don't just mean 99% - it's a much higher proportion than that.

I've found this very consistently, in all of my multiple niches and over many years, now.

Like many thousands of other Warriors (in spite of some very rare alleged exceptions) I couldn't make a living without list-building.

I do get people clicking on some product-advertising banners on my sites, but the people who click on them and buy the product are people who have been directed to that page by a link in an email I've sent them, after they've opted in at an earlier visit to the site. There are reasons for that.

Very few people buy anything much at their first visit to a sales page, so one needs a way of keeping them going back to it. And most of the income in affiliate marketing (which is what I do) comes from making repeated sales of different products to the same people. Without list-building, one can't do either of those things! :p

I think the last person with whom I had a long discussion in a forum-thread about selling ClickBank products with affiliate-links directly from a site/blog (no list) had had 4,000 clicks on an affiliate link, leading to a total of 4 sales of which 2 were refunded. I thought those figures were fairly typical. Some people disagree with me. But if you ask people who are making any significant money from ClickBank, as affiliates, they'll all tell you to build a list.

There are a few hundred threads in this forum with titles similar to "What's The One Thing You'd Do Differently If You Were Starting Again Tomorrow?". Take a look through a small sample of them, and you'll find that one of the things they all have in common is that they're full of replies from long-established, successful Warriors almost all of whom give the same answer: the thing they'd do differently, with what they know now but didn't know when they started, is "start to build a list on day 1". There are reasons for that, and they're very good and very valid reasons.

These posts/threads may help anyone interested ...

What are the best ways to promote click bank products?
Is it a good idea to spend some time on building a mailing list ?
Without Building a List, How Consistent is Your Income from Affiliate Marketing
What are the essential things to know about list building?
Website or squeeze page

There are a few (a very, very few!!) people here who even claim to have well-converting ClickBank affiliate sites without list-building, but when you look carefully at the other, unrelated stuff that those same people are saying, in other threads, almost none of it actually stands up to examination for a moment. Draw your own conclusions. :p

I've been making money online since 2005 consistently without a single email list. The reason? I hate sending emails as much as I hate receiving offers.... My clickbank and amazon authority sites doesn't have optin form but they are converting really well...

A list makes it easy to promote your products btw so i dont recommend not having one but of course, there are always people that find success without one out there

got to agree...no list very hard to get sales..

But it's not for every business.

I build lists, but the majority of sales I make as an affiliate are without a list.

It's not hard to get sales without a list if you know what you're doing.

Many super affiliates we don't even know exist make millions without building lists.

If you really want to know you need a list or not, try to do a split test since you need different plan for different niche. You might make more or less money with a list.

I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars online, and maybe five of those sales TOPS were from my email lists

That said, I am currently working on developing a big, responsive list

Having a list definitely isn't mandatory, but it can be a very useful asset for an affiliate marketer especially if you're promoting a bunch of different products.

If you built a list from the traffic of every single one of your products you promote and then promoted those products and other products automatically via follow up over time then I'm sure you would be making a lot more money than you are now and you can promote any new product to your existing lists that would find it relevant

You can even sell off clicks as a solo ad vendor, so many ways to monetize a list so ya I would say you are leavcing money on the table without a doubt

Hi,
I am new in the domain and do not have a lot of experience with this, but aren't your offers going to be considered spam when you send them to an entire list of people? Is this method as efficient as people want it to be?
Thx

I never had a list until recently and I've always made money.


I haven't had a day job in years BUT...


What I typically recommend to people is this.


If you are new and want to make money fast, you don't need a list.


But as soon as you get ahead, take some time to build a list even IF...


It means your money slows down for a while.


You can't go wrong with a list but you don't NEED it.


You don't NEED anything. It's all about the person.

I started make money online by offering services.In other words, without list.From there, I got a list of clientele and thats when i market more products/services to them over and over again including affiliate products.

I used to.

If you have a mechanism upon which to contact your audience efficiently, and better than everyone ese...

You can make a killing.

The problem? Methods like that are very difficult to come by, and typically don't last.

Do you know what DOES last?

..

..

An email list.

I have no list and I made thousands.

Yes, I do "make money online" without an Email List.
However, I'm not an "Affiliate Marketer" (at the moment).

Maybe you want to target your question specifically at Affiliate Marketers? Because there are lots of other ways to make money online.


I earned $3000 in Profits last week with one of my businesses, and I never made a "Mailing List" out of my clients' contact information.

So far, I've only used their emails for direct communication.
Maybe some time in the future, I can promote something to them, like a Special or a New Service we are offering.

I don't like receiving those "Random Emails" myself, so I avoid using that strategy on others.


I actually plan to get into a bit of Affiliate Marketing later on, when I get more free time. However, that strategy will likely NOT involve using an Email list.


In any case, I DO think that creating an Email List of potential buyers is a good idea for most affiliate marketers.

You simply need to sit down and think through the "Visitor-to-Buyer" process very well, for your business model.

Whether using a Mailing list would be profitable to you or not, depends on what you are doing, and what you are selling.

-Andrew

You can absolutely make money without a list...and lots of it.

HOWEVER.....building a list is going to give you another layer of monetization, targeted traffic and will guard you from being too dependent on organic search traffic. Additionally the list becomes a unique asset that increases the value of your overall property should you decide to sell.

If you make a lot of money without a list you will make even more with one.

Wow! If I was promoting 1,000 products, I think I would go crazy! But congratulations on your success.

I take the conventional path and build a list.

It doesn't hurt and you have the ability to market to paying customers multiple times.

Just my 2 cents

You don't need a list but it gives you an opportunity to make more money as well as build a following. If you're making money without a list it wouldn't hurt to build one.

Well that's true Andrew,. but if we built up an email list for getting relevant subscribers, we have larges scope of expanding our consumer base day by day. We do have a chance to spread our new product introduction rapidly through our subscriber's networks. I understand your concern as an affiliate marketer about building email list, I purely suggest you to go with it positively but also make sure about your other internet marketing functions which your run on daily basis.

I never focused on building a list either. It certainly can't hurt to have a list, but it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. I would think if you're going the affiliate route then you would want to build a list.

Find a couple PLR ebooks and set up a squeeze page that focuses on some of your most popular affiliate products. You could then offer a page with your affiliate products on the thank you page. I'm sure you must know which products are converting best.

I tell my students to focus on fewer products, and become an expert at promoting those.

Good Luck!

Tommy

I build lists in all of the niches that I'm in and the majority of sales in
most of them come from email marketing to those lists.

At the same time, I use PPC, Facebook Ads, etc. to drive traffic
to webinars or membership sites where I also make sales.

With the webinars, they are often added to niche lists in
conjunction with attending the webinars.

With membership sites, members are often asked to join some
type of notification list. I also think of a membership site itself
as "a list" although I guess "community" is a more accurate
description.

The reality for me is that with most promotional efforts, 98%
of people aren't going to buy on the first contact, and if I
don't follow up, I've essentially wasted that percentage of my
advertising dollars, time, and other resources. So, I do list
build

Willie

I started out without building a list. I can be done, but from my opinion you have to work harder if you don't have a list.

Most people don't buy the first time they visit your site or affiliate link. So you end up losing that customer and then have to work hard at getting new customers.

If you have a list then chances are that person will opt in. This means that you now have a customer you can promote to over and over again.

One of the mistakes I made online was not building my list earlier.

I do build a list and make most of my money from my list. You can still make money without a list but i can imagine it would be a lot harder and longer.

List building is just one of the hundreds of ways for us to make money online. Right now, I am making money with my affiliate niche sites and SEO services as well.

Thanks for the input everyone. This is pure gold.

Plenty of people make money without a list. Myself included.

The IM community gets obsessed with list building because the top IM gurus tend to promote email marketing almost exclusively.

They probably do that because in the world of internet marketing, email marketing is the "safest" way to build your business. No Google update can come along and destroy your email list's profitability like it can destroy a site that profits from only organic traffic.

Yes, absolutely there is plenty of money to be made without a list. I made a lot of money through other 'niche' forums by offering certain types of websites to people. You just need to know how to get the fish on the hook

a list is not essential to do business ... but to have a list on which to focus is better, allows you to better promote your products, is a half more to expand your business

If you thing and imagine a big company, take as network.. what they have.. they have list of customers numbers and if they want they promote anything to their customer to just short SMS..

but how they got that list of customers, they promoted and promoted to get the list. Same goes to our industry.. you need good list of database in different types of nich.. so I believe day 1 building list is important.

A huge number of my business models are not reliant on a list.

Tom

The only thing that crosses my mind is why would you not ? It's not that hard and anyone who has the skills to 'kill it' just by promoting products direct would not doubt find it very easy to sell to their list, so it's money being left on the table.

Some people make very good money utilizing an email list of some sort, and others have found ways of making money with one (PPC advertising, SEO, Video Marketing etc)

Their are numerous ways to earn with and without a list.

There are always exceptions, but generally speaking, building a list (or lists) would only increase earnings.

You could sell also without a mailing list.
Have a mailing list increase your effect and ensure higher convertions!

I'm just not much of an 'all eggs in one basket' kinda guy so while I do make money from my list, I also use methods to make money that don't involve my list.

I make money without a list and I will share as I asked you to. Although most of my efforts go into building my list of email subscribers, I have spent even more time in recent years on promoting brand names through PPC advertising. It works trust me.

Sure you can run business without building your email list, but having an email list give you huge benefit, and if you already making lots of sales and driving traffic, if doesn't really take you any effort to build you list.

infact by not building you email list you are leaving lots of money on the table. and it works for all kind of businesses doesn't matter what niche you are in..

Agreed, the list is helpful to build a relationship with customers or potential customers.

When I first started out online, I made money by using PPC ads to promote CPA and Clickbank offers.

Then I moved on to email marketing as it is a more stable way to earn a long-term income.

Today there are lots of ways to make money online without a list, including publishing ebooks on Kindle, and Youtube ad revenue sharing.

There are many marketers that earn full time income WITHOUT HAVING ANY LIST.
But I personally think that they are leaving a lot of money on that table.
Having a responsive list, and you can do wonders with it!

Dawood Khan

I do not see the dependency for making money on the list. Am I the only one?

Many years ago I used to make consistent income on ebay without email list.

But having one does help a lot.

The expression goes that the "Money is in the list". It doesn't matter what type of list it is, what matters is that you can contact that "list".

Yes, you can make money without an email list. But you'll probably need some other kind of list.

When Allen Says ran this forum, he often made it clear that although he didn't send a lot of emails - this forum was his "list". (He made a killing with both his emails and selling directly through the forum.)

Facebook is just a massive list of people that you, as a marketer can contact.

AdWords. Same thing.

Even SEO boils down to your skill/ability to contact a "list" of people that do searches on certain search engines.

The difference? When you own the list, you control your business. When Google or FB (or whoever) controls the "list", they control your business, what you can do with it and how much it's going to cost you to reach that "list".

Go to one of the marketplaces where they sell "Website Businesses" and check out the difference an email list makes to the selling price of that business.

Ugly websites with an email list can sell for 10X more than gorgeous sites without that asset.

You may love having an email list. You may feel indifferent about email lists. But you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that regrets building an email list.

I used to make money without a list, I didn't even know what list building was.

Obviously with a list it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

I never even heard of "build your list" until I saw it at this forum, and I still haven't started on that.

What do people think of starting with MailChimp? It seems to be a good option to start off free.