Someone wanted me to look at their boat related affiliate web site this week. They had a nice site, some great content, it was well optimized, and they were getting traffic.

The problem was that they were not making many affiliate sales. They told me all the things they had tried: New products, different links, different placements, optimized for more and different keywords, etc.

They had done everything BUT the most important thing! They were not building a list with the site!

I don’t care who you are or what your business is; if your purpose for having a web site is to make money or to increase sales to an existing business, you should be building a list!

It’s 10X easier to get a new lead than it is to make a sale. It’s then also 10X easier to make a sale to those leads than it is to first time/one time visitors to your site. It’s VERY hard to close a sale to a first time visitor. Without a list, most of your visitors are first time/only time visitors!

Building and properly marketing to a list of boat enthusiasts would bring the boat site owner more sales than anything else he could do. Period.

Why don’t more site owners use this valuable marketing method? Here are a few reasons I have heard:

1. The site owner simply did not know how valuable a list could be.
2. He or she knew a list was valuable but thought their site “needed more traffic” to justify the cost.
3. Some site owners think email marketing can be accomplished by simply “buying” lists.
4. Building a list is just “too much work” or too much trouble.

My answers:

1. The saying, “The money is in the list” is absolutely true. Actually, it’s not just “having” a list….the money is in properly marketing to that list.
2. Don’t wait to begin building your list! You can’t afford NOT to begin right now! aWeber only charges $20 a month to handle up to 500 leads. If the boat site owner had a list of 500 boat enthusiasts, $20 is NOTHING compared to how much he could be making with just that small list!
3. What a waste of money….’nough said about that idea.
4. I can’t help too much for that one. If you want to profit with a business, you have to be willing to do what’s required.

aWeber is the list building service I use and they are the most popular. I have a link below where you can sign up for a 30 day test drive if you are not already using them. I also give away an aWeber tutorial for anyone signing up for the trial. Details here:

List Building Video