Last November, I made a post about how The Money’s In The List. I should start listening to my own advice! Truth be told, I’m just lazy when it comes to the e-mail aspect of the business, and it costs me a TON of money in lost revenue.

One of the merchants I work with sent me an e-mail last week. They wanted me to promote the upcoming Jimmy Buffett concert, specifically his stop in Philadelphia. (Since they’re based in the Philadelphia area)

I logged into my Constant Contact account (which I hadn’t logged into since late December!), and headed over to the Contact List page. I exported all of my contacts into a CSV file, which I then sorted that list by state in MS Excel. I saved all of the contacts that were in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware into a new CSV file, and imported that file into Constant Contact under a new group called Philadelphia.

I quickly threw together an e-mail to this group, letting them know that the merchant still had tickets available for this performance, and stuck in my affiliate link. The e-mail went out to the 122 contacts from the Philadelphia group. The click-through rate on the e-mail wasn’t anything to write home about, but one person did make a fairly big purchase. My commission on that sale – $110!

It’s not huge, but I spent less than 10 minutes putting together the list, filing in the blanks on a Constant Contact template, and blasting out that e-mail. Do that 6 times in an hour with similiar results, and you’re making $660/hr! Sure beats McDonalds.

So the inevitable question – How do you build an e-mail list? Russell Brunson from Affiliate Evolution calls it the “Commission Bump”, but I call it common sense. I capture my visitors information before passing them along to the merchant. I now have a list of people who I know are interested in a particular niche. And they’ve given me permission to market to them in the form of a newsletter or something. As they say, the money’s in the list!