subject: Why You Should Forget About Building a List [print this page] Why You Should Forget About Building a List
It's been side time and time again, "The money's in the list." And it's true that you can make an awful lot of money with an email marketing list.
But there are other ways to make money with affiliate marketing that don't involve all that list management, content creation--or headache. They all involve focusing on what are known as the "buying keyphrase".
What is the buying keyphrase? It's whatever term people type into a search engine when they know what they want and are ready to buy it. "MP3 player" is a niche phrase. "Black iPod 3G" is a buying phrase. Buying phrases are the most ultra-specific you can get. And people who look up these phrases are ready to buy, instead of be put on a list.
This works really well with trends. With trends, you often don't get time to make a list before the trend hits its peak. Nor can you make use of a list afterwards. List-building is a long term strategy that works well with some niche markets and not so well with others. Trends are definitely in the latter category. And even in niches where list-building really pays off, targeting the buying keyphrase can pay off even more!
One of the great things about buying phrases is that they generally have very little competition. Most internet marketers are so obsessed with getting people to a website or on a list, and corralling them to the sales point, they forget that there are people who are already at that sales point!
This may be because the ratio of browsers to buyers is pretty high. Most marketers go after the browser traffic, since larger numbers equal more money in their eyes. But which would you rather have--10,000 people who browse your website, or one single person who buys something off of your website. If you'd rather have the ten thousand, you're probably in the wrong business.
One of the great things about targeting a buying phrase is that the hard work has already been done--by someone else! Your buyers were browsers at one point in their consumer career. And it's a safe bet that they've seen at least one affiliate marketing website that promoted the same product you're selling.
There are innumerable affiliate marketing sites in almost every niche these days. Most of them try and educate or pre-sell their customers. It'd be a shame if all of their hard work didn't pay off. Make it pay off--for you!
