Anyone here making a living from safelist/mailer subscriptions?

[Ernie Geeting]

Hey Marketers,

 

Here's a question for you...

 

Is anyone here making a consistent residual income through promoting safelists or mailers alone?

 

I would also be interested to know if someone could earn a living soley by being an affiliate of them. Mathmatically it is possible but is anyone actually doing it (besides the owners themselves)?

 

Ernie G

[Evelyn Kramer]

Hi,

This is a very good question. I have made some affiliate money promoting, but the truth is I have made more money promoting my own. The "House always wins" kind of thing. Unless you buy the house, or at least upgrade to lifetime JV, the money isn't there. My affiliate sales are from my Lifetime JV upgrades.

 

 

[Kenny Kolijn]

Well, if you have a big downline and enough referrals who take a monthly subscription and keep it, you can definitely earn a good residual income by promoting mailers (or other sites).

 

A quality mailer can definitely be worth promoting. I personally use a lot of mailers but more as tools to make my own sites and lists grow, not with the goal to earn by promoting them although that happens frequently. I do have a Traffic Exchange that I promote, where I grabbed myself a lifetime reseller account. That was a real bargain that brings in 100% commissions on upgrades.

 

 

 

[Matt Koshko]

That's a pretty tall order. Unless you have hundreds and hundreds of referrals I would tend to believe 99% of people aren't making a liveable income from such subscription commissions alone. There may be a few people but I doubt it's more than a handful.

 

If you think about Mailers, the subscription price weighed with the commission (let's say 75% max) might make you at most $25/month per subscription, and that's on the high end. To most people, $2k/month is not a liveable income and that right there would require 80 paid referrals spending $35/month with a 75% commission level. This is just an example of course.

 

The bigger number you need to consider is in order to get 80 paid referrals it'll take hundreds and hundreds of referrals. Let's say there is a 20% conversion rate (which is unheard of (high)), you would need 400 referrals.

 

Hope that puts it in to perspective a bit.

[Darren Olander]

I can say I've earned a great deal promoting mailers (that I don't own)... being an affiliate you want to recommend many different things to your list, which in this case would be many of your favorite mailers, this way you get the same people joining you and upgrading in many different sites and it drastically increases your earnings. So yes, if you treat your business as a store with a variety of products instead of having just one and only one offer you have a far better chance to earn more :-) To get the most out of this type of advertising one would want to use many different mailers anyway...

[Ernie Geeting]

Great answers everyone!

 

I am blown away by the quality of the responses to my question and the caliber of the marketers represented here.

 

No doubt Evelyn, ownership has it's privilages and the greater potential for a 'job replacing' income. I would think it would be very difficult for an unknown player to get noticed with a new startup mailer (although I do see many new ones popping up daily). Grabbing the JV upgrades in the programs you plan to promote as an affiliate sounds like very good advice.

 

Kenny I would agree that the newer 100% commission sites could dramatically change the picture for mailer affiliates. A few brave pioneers have begun to blaze that trail and I would think some savvy marketers are destined to earn plenty in commissions. It will be interesting to see whether the owners of these sites are setting a new trend for mailers or creating an entirely separate mailer niche.

 

Matt, great analysis. Being the analytical type myself I tend to approach this whole question in a similar manner, "How many people would one need to recruit to get the number of upgrades required to earn $XXXX?", etc. What about attrition, and so on. Really sheds some light on the immense effort required.

 

Darren, I love your perspective. The whole idea of viewing the mailer affiliate business as a store with a variety of products and then selling those products to regular customers (the list) is aweseome. That kind of thinking really resonates with me as I like to imagine myself in the role of a merchant with loyal customers.

 

You guys are awesome! I would like to think that with the right approach and proper effort making a living soley as a mailer or traffic exchange affilate is attainable.

 

Ernie G

[William Brant]

Depends on what your definition of "make a living" is.

 

Everyone has a different standard of living, and for some

I am sure its very easy to make enough promoting Safelists/ mailers

and make enough to live comfortably.

 

I wouldn't base my entire business on promoting other peoples

sites though, unless it was on the back end of my personal list

or a site of my own first.

 

If you focus on building downlines in a site and making good commissions

what happens if they close, or change their commission structure or.. any other

number of possibilities.

 

If you are building your own list first you can communicate with your list

and let them know what happened and what you are doing about it, and have them

join a different site with you, which you wouldn't be able to do, if the site

just closed.

 

 

[Daniel Gonzales]

Great question Ernie! As the standards rise, so will the incomes ;-)

 

MarketingCheckpoint is a great example of a new standard emerging.

[Stefan Berg]

I Make My Living by Using Promoting and Being a Owner of A Mailer...

Done so over the Last Years... I went Fulltime online 2009 and

I did not make enough to pay all Bills in the beginning but

now I make more then I need... (You can always spend more lol)

 

Most of my income is from building my list using mailers...

I Would recommend you to follow Williams advice above lol

 

No need for me to repeat the same thing but I want to stress

The Importance of having your own real estate as in Blogs,

own splash, squeeze, thank you, sales pages and build up

your affiliate sales and downlines in the funnel and your

Backend sales...

 

Go for it...

[Ernie Geeting]

Thank you William, Daniel and Stefan,

 

I would imagine you are correct about the benefits and importance of owning your own 'real estate'. Replicated pages, even great ones get way over-exposed online and quickly lose their effectiveness. Branding replicated pages doesn't seem to help a whole lot either since the base page remains the same.

 

Taking that a step further perhaps actual ad exchange ownership could potentially light the afterburner on one's marketing efforts. Most of the people who do make a full time living (job replacing income) with exchanges appear to be owners as well as members.

 

Just over 5 years ago a operated 5 different text ad exchanges and one traffic exchange while working a full-time offline job and maintaining a hypnotherapy practice. Eventually I closed the TAEs and TE but I did learn that advertising exchanges are an outstanding way of building a list.

 

Most list building I see going on is very self-serving (constant offers, little value to the subscriber -"just send me money") but with the ad exchanges I was able to provide some great stuff (promos and credits) to my members while at the same time having a trusted platform to present good products and services to them. Instead of 'fleecing the sheep' I felt more like a shepherd caring for and 'feeding' them good stuff. I loved that service aspect.

 

In fact, I've been thinking about getting back in to the ad exchange ownership game but am a little bit intimidated by the sheer volume of great sites already out there. Right now it seems like mailers are the hot thing, popping up like mushrooms on a damp day. On the other hand, back in the day I worked out some nice JVs with other owners and met some great people in the process.

 

So maybe it's time for me to jump back in. As much as I love the industry and crave serving and interacting with members it seems kind of silly for me to just be a spectator.

 

Ernie G