Building a responsive list is one of the most powerful tools available to entrepreneurs who want to get paying subscribers to a membership website. It can help you get new customers, keep old customers on longer and even make money from non-subscribers.
Here’s how to use list building to generate monthly income.
Increase Subscriptions to Recurring Billing Products
It’s a lot harder to get someone to agree to be billed once than it is to get someone to agree to be billed again and again, indefinitely.
This is especially true if they’re only hearing about you for the first time. If they land on your website from an AdWords ad, read a couple articles and see your sales page, there’s usually just not enough trust established to get someone to agree to be billed every month.
List building can change that.
By getting someone on your list, you can extend that sales process over the course of weeks and months. They’ll get to trust you, believe in you and believe in your products. This will increase your overall conversion many folds, even if it doesn’t increase your upfront conversion.
The “Monthly Push” Strategy
One time tested strategy to get people to sign up to a membership site is to do a monthly push, promoting whatever the product is this month, rather than the program itself.
For example, let’s say you’re in the “how to invest your money” market. Every month you send a different DVD out about various investing strategies. This month, you’re evaluating gold investing.
Instead of promoting your membership program, you send an email blast out promoting the virtues of gold investing. You talk about why most people make mistakes investing in gold and how the right investors with the right mindset can make it big. You sell this month’s program as if it were its own product.
Do this every month, for every different topic that comes out. Of course, the rest of the time you need to be providing valuable content to not burn out your list. But this “monthly push” strategy is incredibly effective if you’re putting out content on different topics every month.
Recurring Revenue Affiliate Products
If you have people who aren’t signing up to your programs, if you have them on your list, you can promote affiliate products to them instead. In fact, you can even promote affiliate products to them even if they did sign up for your program.
Recurring revenue affiliate programs can be a nice supplement to your existing recurring income. In the above example, the investing newsletter’s owner might sell someone else’s newsletter that’s just focused on gold investing as an affiliate. He’d get a commission every month that buyer remains a paying subscriber.
These are just a few ways to take advantage of having an email list to generate recurring income. Setting up an email list just takes a few hours and the returns will be well worth your effort.