Affiliate Marketing - Should You Build a List in Every Niche?

If you visit the various internet marketing forums or subscribe to other marketers' email lists, you will probably have been told that you have to build an email list in every niche you enter. However is this really the case, or are there times when it doesn't make sense to build a list?

Most affiliate marketers promote products in more than one niche simply because the more niches you are in, the more money you can potentially earn. However it can be really time consuming promoting a number of different products in different niches and yet we're constantly being told we have to build an email list of subscribers so we always have an audience to market to.

It takes a lot of time and effort to both build a list (making an opt-in form and/or a lead capture page and driving traffic to this page) and maintain a list. Although you can promote product offers to each list you have, you also need to constantly provide good quality content to your list in order to build a relationship with your subscribers and keep them signed up and interested in reading your emails.

Now as you can imagine if you are involved in say ten different niches, then this task will become a nightmare, and even if you outsource the task of writing content, it will still be quite costly and difficult to manage.

However, the good news is that there are definitely times when you can enter a niche and not have to build an email list. In fact there are certain instances where you can make more money by not building a list. For example, if you are in a smaller niche where there are only one or two products you could sell as an affiliate, then there is little point in building a huge list just to promote these few products. You would be better off just promoting and linking to these products directly from your website.

There are also niches that are so saturated that you are unlikely to make as much money as you would imagine from your list, simply because there are so many other marketers competing with you. Therefore any subscribers you may have will also probably be subscribed to lots of other marketers' lists as well, so your open rate could be very low. A classic example of one such niche is the make money online / internet marketing niche.

I built up a list in this niche myself for about a year and despite offering a lot of good quality content, I found that it had a very low response rate whenever I promoted any products. It was only when I started building lists in other niches that I discovered how much time and effort I had wasted promoting to internet marketers. My other lists in less saturated niches respond so much better. Even competitive niches like Forex trading and weight loss have much better open rates and conversions in my experience.

Another option for affiliate marketers who don't necessarily want to build email lists for each niche is to just concentrate on promoting affiliate products that pay a recurring income like monthly membership sites, autoresponders and web hosts for example. This way you can build up a nice growing monthly income by just promoting a single product because you will earn consistent monthly commissions from each customer or subscriber.

So overall although we would all ideally like to have a huge email list in every niche we are in, it's not always necessary or more profitable to do so. We all have a limited amount of time and it's very often the case that we can make more money simply by driving traffic directly to products from our websites rather than having to worry about building a list and constantly providing good quality content to this list in order to make sales.

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