Email marketing is one of the main methods of promotion for affiliates worldwide. No matter what market or niche you’re in, you should surely consider email marketing as one of your possible income streams.
However, the whole concept of email marketing can be intimidating, especially for beginner affiliates.
After all, you do have to focus on things like creating unique content for your newsletter, crafting an attractive gift that will convince people to subscribe, displaying the opt-in form somewhere, and then managing and sending email once you start bringing some subscribers.
First of all, we hope that your affiliate site is running on WordPress – the best and easiest to use website management system (and it’s free at the same time).
Another mandatory element is using a quality theme to make sure that your site is well-built, secure and optimized for both your visitors and search engines. You can achieve this by getting one of the themes offered by StudioPress.
Once you have these two out of the way, you can start building an email marketing list and making it available to the world.
Sign up to an email marketing service
There’s a lot of possibilities available, but it’s good to start by signing up to something free, so you can test the waters and maybe even make some money before you switch to a paid account.
Luckily, one of the top email marketing companies – MailChimp – offers free accounts for small, startup lists. MailChimp also provides a lot of tutorials and how to guides on how to get started with the service in no time.
Once you have your account ready and your first campaign set up you can go back to WordPress.
Get a custom widget
This step is where you set your opt-in form to display on your site. There are two main ways in which you can do this: either display the form manually by embedding the HTML code, or get a widget that will do this work for you. Of course, the latter is a much better solution.
The widget we can recommend is simply called MailChimp Widget.
The widget allows you to display forms for any of your MailChimp lists, and it also provides some extra features (you can learn about them by reading the description on the official site).
What’s next?
That’s it, from this point on your email list is fully integrated with your WordPress site. The “only” thing you have to do now is drive traffic to your site, and create top content for your email newsletter.