Email marketing is still one of the easiest ways to maximize your income, even if you’re just starting an online business 
with limited experience and knowledge.
Building a list is without a doubt, the most important thing you can do for any business. However, it’s not enough to just build a list. You also want to earn money from that list. Here are 5 proven ways to make that happen.
Affiliate Marketing
This is perhaps the most common technique used by many email marketers. They build a list around a specific niche and promote affiliate products to their list. These products are created by someone else. Your job is to sell the product and anytime a sale is made you make a commission.
The best thing about this model is you don’t need to worry about any customer service issues. As the middleman, you are simply referring your list to a product.
If any issues come up with their purchase, they just contact the vendor. The key to being successful with affiliate marketing is to promote products that your list will benefit from. Some email marketers make the mistake of promoting everything and anything to their list. This could result in your subscribers losing trust and eventually their removal from your list.
The following are some of the more widely known affiliate programs that you can join.
1. Clickbank
2. Share-A-Sale
3. Commission Junction
4. JVZoo
5. Awin
6. Amazon
7. Rakuten
Create Your Own Products
Creating and selling your own products is one of the best ways to make money with an email list. Unfortunately, most people steer clear of this because they think it’s too hard, time-consuming and they don’t know what to create.
However, that doesn’t have to be the case. For instance, If you have a number of blog posts on the same subject, you can basically put them together and turn them into an ebook. You can also create a brand new product from scratch. Keep in mind that the product doesn’t need to be eighty pages in length.
Just think about it, instead of earning commissions selling affiliate products that already exist, you get to keep 100% of the profits for yourself.
It can be as simple as a 10 to 20-page report which can be sold anywhere from $7 to $10. You can repeat this process over and over again. Can you imagine creating a new short report every week and selling it? That can undoubtedly turn into hundreds or more per week.
All you gotta do is examine which types of offers your list favours, and create your products based on that. Aside from pitching your products to your existing list, you can also add them to thank you pages for new opt-ins.
If you would prefer not to create the product yourself, you can always outsource it or use high-quality PLR (private label rights) products that are readily available for you to make your own.
Sell Solo Ads
Once you’ve built a substantial list of subscribers, you can essentially rent it out to other marketers. With solo ads, people are paying you to send out promotional emails for them to your list for one day.
There are literally thousands of marketers who would be eager to rent out a decent sized list. It is called a solo ad because there is only one offer promoted within that mailing. As a list owner, you set the price for an exclusive solo ad. The more responsive your list and the more clicks required, the more you can charge.
There are many solo ad marketplaces where you can find buyers looking to place their ads in front of qualified consumers. To guarantee you get paid, make sure to use a legit marketplace.
Two of the more popular ones are Udimi and The Traffic Source.
Email Based Coaching
Coaching and consulting is big business and increasingly more email marketers are getting involved in this by charging for either personal or group training.
If you own an engaged subscriber list, you could easily magnify your earnings by setting up a coaching program that provides in-depth training on a specific topic.
Your coaching program could be designed to be delivered over Skype, through email, or via a private Facebook group. In addition, you could also set up a fully-loaded training program via sites like Teachable.com, or Udemy.com in order to streamline your business and grow your audience outside of your email campaigns.
Training programs are also an excellent way to position yourself as an authority in your niche and to increase brand recognition. They also function as valuable testing grounds for future product ideas as you obtain useful feedback from students going through the course.
Host a Webinar
Another great way to monetize your own list of email subscribers is through webinars.
You can either charge people to attend or provide top-notch content for free and then deliver your sales pitch at the end.
The second option is usually how the majority of webinars operate.
Apart from broadcasting the webinar to your list, you can also market it by posting a simple ad. Even if those added subscribers do not buy or attend the webinar, you still have the opportunity to sell them something else at a later date.
A key tip for promoting webinars is to email your list right up until the webinar goes live. About 60% of registrations occur within a week before the webinar, so you need to send reminder emails to encourage last-minute sign-ups.
Summary
Email marketing is here to stay and in order to transform your list into a money-maker takes careful planning. With very little upfront costs you can build your business and supercharge your online income.
The strategy is to work towards consistently expanding your reach by generating the perfect combination of free, valuable content with promotional-based offers.
With an email list, you can set your income on complete autopilot by using one or more of the methods outlined above.
What other ways are you using to monetize your list?
Mark Hines
virtualprofits.net
This is a guest post from Mark Hines if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.
