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Are Volunteer Email Lists Still Valuable In This Age Of SPAM?
One of the things blogging has done is cause a kind of exodus from newsletters or ezines to online publishers who simply post the information on their blogs.
It's not too hard to see why online publishers adopted blogging so quickly and enthusiastically. In reality, the SPAM monster seemed to be slowly squeezing the life out of your online business. To meet the challenge of SPAM, most ISPs have set up SPAM filters that are so powerful that they often filter requested mail, especially bulk subscription type mail. This has meant an increasing number of returns and undeliverable mail.
With the advent of blogging there was an easy way out of all this anxiety. Ezines could easily be blogged and no ISP SPAM filter would touch it. What's more, the email aspect of feedback was not lost because readers could easily post a comment on the blog. The big advantage over email here was that one could see other readers comment and quickly support or disagree with it. Blogs have revolutionized publishing in a way that no other tool has in human history.
So have blogging made email newsletters and subscription email lists obsolete? The answer is a firm "NO". Nothing would be further from the truth. Even when an online publisher offers his weekly or daily content on a blog, what is the best way to maintain and increase traffic to the blog?
In reality, even with a website, there is no other more efficient way to maintain high traffic than by collecting email addresses. This is done by offering an email newsletter or some kind of email course. This creates a valuable optional email list that you can use over and over again to drive traffic to your site. You can even sell them something. As internet marketers often point out, the money is in the list.
This is why the experts advise affiliates to create their own sites or blogs to play a key role in their efforts to market their affiliate site. This is simply because it is a huge waste to drive so much traffic to your affiliate site and end up having only a small fraction signing up for your affiliate program. By driving traffic through your own site, you have the opportunity to collect emails and build a huge and valuable targeted opt-in email list that the same affiliate program can still market to later on. In fact, research has clearly shown that most people buy only after several repeated encounters with the same product or service.
Even with the introduction of the extremely useful blogging tool and changing business models by many online publishers, elective email lists remain the most valuable online marketing tool.
