I would venture a guess that almost every affiliate marketer starts out at Clickbank picking a product to promote, gets their Clickbank affiliate link and then runs to Google Adwords and gives pay-per-click a try. What most people start out doing is driving traffic straight to the merchant's website. If you make a sale you get a pretty hefty commission, usually 50%-75% and you are happy as a pig in you know what. The whole problem with trying to make money in this manner is that when you finally do make a sale that's it, you will never see that customer again.

I know this is what I did, but it didn't take me long to figure out that this was not going to

work. It just didn't make sense to me to spend all kinds of time and money getting traffic to make one sale. There has to be a better way. Well there is, it's called "List Building".

If you are going to make it in affiliate marketing you are going to have to find some way to make that sale and be able to contact that customer again and again for future sales. This is where list building comes into play. There is an over used saying online that I hate using so I won't. Well you know what, with the risk of being shot I just can't think of a better way to put it than to just say it. "The Money is in the List". There, I said it.

Instead of sending traffic to the merchant's website, send them to your squeeze page first so you can capture their name and email address and insert them into your subscriber database. You may not realize it now, but having their personal information is way more valuable than making that one sale. If you nurture your list correctly, you will have a chance to make sales over and over again to the same people instead of a one-time deal.

You may be asking, how do I get their name and email and how do I store it? Well, you need what's known as an autoresponder. It's a mailing list management program that captures all the personal information you get from your squeeze page and stores it in a database. This is how all the big affiliate marketers make money online. Now when you see a product you want to promote you set up your autoresponder to send out an email to your list. This is now free traffic. Depending on how big your list is you could possibly make several sales, or even hundreds of sales just by spending a few minutes writing one email. This sure beats the one-time sale you were making before you started building your list.

So you can now see that List Building is a must if you want to make it in Affiliate Marketing.