If content is King the money is still in the list. What is the one thing that all successful Internet Marketers have in common? What is the one thing that sets super affiliates aside from you and me? What is the one thing that prevents over ninety percent of people getting involved with Internet Marketing for the first time from being successful? The answer, like the money, really is in the list.

Nobody has conversion rates hovering anywhere near one-hundred percent but people do have something that makes up for it. You can not simply generate a blind list and expect to make money with it though. You have to be able to generate a targeted list, fill it with people that already have an interest in your product, give them enough information to prove to them that you are an authoritative and trusted source and get them wanting not only to remain on your list, but to be an active part of your list.

When you have accomplished this, you can honestly say that the money really is in the list. That is because people get bombarded with offers to join this mailing list or that mailing list and even more offers that are nothing more than spam. What will set you aside, make your list more responsive and thus, allow you to gain more money from your list, will all boil down to the content that you provide for your readership. When you understand exactly why your content is king, you can put the money in the list … and keep it there.

Your list is your ticket to financial freedom and what will set aside your successful online ventures from the vast number of failures that abound within the realm of Internet Marketing. Your list is (or at least should be) a recurring source of income and something that you can use to accurately generate a viable forecast into exactly how much money you can earn online.

Mike Filsaime, a name most Internet Marketers are familiar with, claims that he averages one dollar per month per subscriber on his list. That is not to say that he makes one dollar a month in actual cash earnings from the subscribers to his lists, but that he averages one dollar a month in actual cash money for each person that is currently on his list. Thus, if you have four thousand people on a list, you should be able to (realistically) expect to be capable of generating four thousand dollars a month in cash income from your targeted email customer list.

Now imagine that you provide quality content for the subscribers that you have added to your list, you promote lots of really great and relevant offers and you have an average open rate of forty percent on your email marketing campaign list. That is almost two thousand people that you are going to see responding to your marketing and promotions. That is almost two thousand people who want to give you money because they are on your list.

Statistically speaking, that should translate into a couple of hundred sales. Even if you are selling something as small as a seven dollar product, you could quickly replace any income that may have been lost in other areas. If you are selling higher-end products, can you begin to see why it is so commonly said that the money is in the list? Why you may think it sounds cliché, it really is true now, has been true in the past and will remain true in the future; content is King and the money is in the list!

Building a customer list is one of the most important aspects for any Internet Marketing venture. If you know absolutely nothing else about Internet Marketing, know, understand and believe that you have to have a customer list. If you are an experienced Marketer, you already know the importance of a good customer list and will see that this article barely scratches the surface when it comes to building a viable, recurring and increased income with your customer list.

1. Minimize the need (and cost) of constantly driving new traffic to your sites
2. Maximize the response rate of your customer base
3. Be able to promote products for other people
4. Easy and cheap method of constantly expanding your customer base
5. Maximize profits by being able to sell more products within your niche

One: Minimize the Need and Cost of Driving New Traffic. One of the most difficult aspects for many people getting into the realm of Internet Marketing is learning how to drive new traffic to their website. Even those few that are successful at this important part of successful internet marketing will tell you that it can be an expensive proposition in both the time and finances involved.

However, if you are going to make your IM venture a success, you are going to need to build a customer list. Customer lists cost you absolutely nothing once you have those email addresses safely tucked away. While it may not be a 100% success rate on demand type issue, it does give you a viable source of highly responsive individuals to target for your money-making propositions.

Two: Maximize the response rate of your customer base. Unless you have overly compelling sales copy on your site and you are well above average with adwords and your other marketing campaigns, your customer list is going to be one of your most highly responsive sources of traffic and paying customers.

Blind target generally produces results somewhere around one and one half to three percent conversion rates for average or even good sales copy. Highly targeted traffic such as a customer list generally produces customer conversion rates somewhere between ten and twenty percent with the averages being somewhere between fifteen and eighteen percent. Throw in the fact that once you have built up your customer list within a niche, it requires no additional costs to maintain but only to increase it, and maybe you can begin to see why highly targeted customer lists are so successful … and profitable.

Three: Be Able to Promote Products for Other People. You can promote products for other people all day long on your blog or other website and some people actually make a pretty good living doing this. However, the entire marketing campaign still boils down to being able to constantly drive new traffic to your site or constantly changing ads around to see what works and what does not.

If you only have one web site and you are only promoting a certain number of products, this may work fine for you. However, you are cutting off your nose to spite your face if you are limiting your Internet Marketing Ventures to that extent. Virtual Real Estate (Or VRE) is not expensive and it does provide most people with the opportunity to create a reasonable return on investment.

A good, well-founded and targeted customer list gives you the opportunity to keep in touch with all of your customers. When you do find products that you believe will help them, there is very little more to do other than create some compelling emails, load the text in to an autoresponder or two and allow your customers on your list to decide for themselves.

You do not have to begin an entirely new advertising and marketing campaign each and every time that there is a new product released. Your customer list quite literally puts your customers right at the tip of your fingers. If you want to make it extra compelling and show a few more returns on your Analytics or AWStats account, just re-route them to your web site but you can also just give your customer list what they want and send them directly to the product web page and wait for the results to begin coming in.

What you do while you are waiting is entirely up to you.

Four: Easy and Cheap method of constantly expanding your customer base. It is a proven fact that it is easier to get someone to sign up for something that is free than it is to get them to make a purchase right away. It is also a lot easier to sell them multiple products over the course of time than it is to sell them something once, let them go away and then to spend more money, time and energy trying to get the same people back to your web site. You can do that with a customer list started on your website.

You can easily build up a customer list by offering free reports, emails, newsletters, e-zines or other offers on your site and then have all the contact information that you need to turn those one-time visitors into recurring and highly responsive customers. Now you can keep in touch with the customers you already have and spend your time and effort generating new customers to add to your existing customer list instead of starting over from scratch every time that you find a new product to promote.

Five: Maximize Profits by being able to sell more products. Think back on what you have been learning here. How many products have you seen in your niche that you absolutely had to sell to your customer base? Maybe you were doing it for the commissions and maybe you were doing it because it would actually benefit your customers but the fact remains that you have to put those offers out in front of your customers before you can sell anything.

A customer list is not a one-time affair. It is a list of people that you can communicate with on a regular basis often without the formalities that are associated with other content sites, forums and online communities. You do not need to dig up or pay for new traffic every time that you find a new product when you have an existing customer list that you can get to view the product almost immediately. You do not have to spend time adjusting the ads around on your site hoping that some of your new visitors will actually click on the ads. Again, just tell your customer list what the product is, why you believe that it will benefit them and sit back to watch the results.

No matter what you hope to gain in your Internet Marketing venture, you efforts can only be increased and benefit from the use of a good customer list. The next time you are wondering what kind of conversion rates you can achieve with that brand new product, imagine what kind of conversion rates you could achieve if you had a highly targeted, motivated and responsive customer list already in place to mail the offer out to.