Posted by Bryan Shearer, August 11, 2010

First off, I know many affiliates who have been struggling hard since the crackdown on diet and biz-op rebils and really have no clue where to go from here, as that is all they knew. Personally, diet is a very profitable area for me, but I have built my business around a long-term model instead of the one time sale and quick profit. Here are some ways that I not only can optimize my diet traffic for diet offers, but also for many other niches as well.

I just finished posting a series of posts about email marketing on my personal blog, and this post is kinda a summary of that series into one, minus the basics of knowing how to setup an emailing system. The methods are simple and have been used before, but some people just need a reminder or a little nudge to get them started in the right direction.

I’ll start off with the basics of how I build a list for a site of mine. I run cheap traffic in a general niche to a content site that covers the entire niche. Once the person lands on my content page, which I sometimes target to a category and other times to the home page, depending on the keyword, I have a very simple navigation setup with no ads on the site at all. I am trying to build the trust of the user immediately, and you don’t have much time to do that. Also, ads on your page means they click off your site and you will never see them again, meaning you can’t make anymore money off of them.

Make it simple for the user to go where YOU want them to go. Again, make it simple to find where you want them to go, such as using images or bolder text. Simple stuff, yes, but it needs to be reminded. Once they go to a specific category in your niche, you have the same type of setup. No ads, but now you are giving something away in the sidebar, like a free ebook. Say the general niche is diet and the category is diet foods. Give an ebook away on the best healthy food recipes or an ebook on the best diet plans. People eat them up and are always looking for something new. When they go to download the ebook, simply make them give you their email to get it. And don’t make it an instant download. Send it to their email so that you know it is a valid email. Bait thrown out, now you start to build on it.

When they download your ebook, you are also opting them in to a newsletter based specifically on that niche. You need to have a newsletter for each ebook you give away, so that you can laser target your demographic and content to them. Make sure they know they are opting in of course, or otherwise, it will be spam and of course that is never a good thing, right?

Start your email list off slowly. You need to build trust with your users. At first, just send them out with tips without selling anything to them, maybe linking to one of your sites if you want. Then, you can start slipping in products here and there for your users to try or you can send them to a site that you built that talks about a product, but they don’t know that it is your site. It is all about keeping the customer in your network of sites. Sure, it takes a few bucks to setup and it takes time to really get them filled with quality content, but once you get a network of sites running, you can do wonders with the content.

So, you have setup your email list and you are mailing them and you are getting new subscribers, but your profit is staying about the same or growing too slow. Why is that? While you are getting new users, the old users are getting stale and bored with your newsletters and recommendations. If they are getting bored, what do you do? Spice them up with some new content!

Here is what I mean. Take the diet niche. You have middle aged females as the majority of your demographic, so there are tons of other niches, as a whole, that this demographic loves. Start sending out emails with tips on how to do makeup, cook, fix up the house, etc., all linking to a site you own. What do you do from there? Wash, rinse and repeat, right? Simply point them to something else they like, offer something free, get their email, and start profiting. Plus, you are building a new list, expanding your horizons, and creating laser targeted email lists, which most marketers would die for.

Well, that is the short summary of my series on email marketing. I hope that you picked up a few tips and that you can apply them to your marketing business. Now, go make some money!