If you're selling more than one product, you probably work in more than one niche. How well do you know the niche you're building a list around? If your list is very big, you probably don't know each and every person on it on a personal level, but how much do you know about the niche itself? Like, what words do they use? Where do they hang out?
These are important considerations when maintaining your niche list. The people on it aren't mindless electrons in cyberspace... They're people! If you can't fulfill their expectations for the list, guess what? They'll just unsubscribe.
What can you do?
Simple. If you're not into the niche yourself, you'll have to do some research.
Here's a scenario: Your son just bought this great RC car and you can't keep your hands off it. In fact, you love it so much that you want to sell it to the world! You do some marketing research to see if anyone out there is searching for keywords in that niche, what the competition is, etc. When you find you're on the right track, you have to research more to see how to talk to your niche.
If you go to Yahoo Groups or Google Groups, and let's say you want to sell radio control cars. OK, but the thing is, you're still a newbie in that niche, right? OK... No problem! All you need do is go to Google or Yahoo Groups, and plug in "RC Cars +FAQs." When you see FAQs for newbies, you're on the right trail. Pick out some of the buzzwords, like "table top cars," "ready to run" cars, or "RC servo," and know what those terms mean, too.
Then, join a group or two and read the conversations. Get in on them when appropriate, but if you're new don't ask stupid newbie questions. Be sure that what you intend to ask hasn't already been answered 1,000 times before. Either search the forum or be sure to read those FAQs thoroughly. The point is, when you speak your RC car lovers? lingo, you'll gain their trust. Without that, you have nothing.
So, where are these people?
We've just covered Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, which are two places people in your niche will hang out. Forums are another. But have you thought about getting webmasters in the niche to help you build your list, too? It's simple.
Just find webmasters that don't have what you want to sell already on their sites. Then, email them. Ask questions. Build a relationship, and buy some stuff from them. Eventually, you'll be able to ask if they want to partner with you. So, you put up a link to your squeeze page on their site, and they'll be helping you to build your list and you're both making money at the same time. How cool is that?
However, be sure that the sites you choose to partner with have an Alexa ranking of less than 100,000. Otherwise, the site gets very little traffic. If you contact more than one webmaster, you'll be getting list members and traffic from all over the place!
Marketing to your list and building that list are not just activities. You have to make your efforts systematic.
First, find a product that people want to buy. Then, build a list around it. Be creative about driving traffic to your squeeze page, which will always be the first step to your affiliate page, and BAM! you have a system. Lack of systems is way most marketers fail. Put your system on a solid track and you can't lose.