Can you really make money from a small email list?
Do you need to have tens of thousands of subscribers to make a decent living online?
The answers to those questions are yes and no respectively. People with relatively small lists of email subscribers make good money all the time.
It boils down to the relationship they have with their list.
Would you like some proof?
A while ago, brand new list builder John R Meese bought a WordPress theme. The theme was a popular item sold by Michael Hyatt, but it was a little “clunky”.
Once he figured out how to work with it, John started hitting the WordPress forums, helping people through the problems they were having with this particular theme.
He began to build a list, which he had never done before, offering his help for free.
He eventually built a course that solves any and every question someone using that WordPress theme would have.
On just 250 subscribers and 8 emails, John did $10,000 dollars in just 7 days.
Another list building newbie, Cathryn Lavery has always been involved with journaling and self-improvement topics.
She built a small list of 2,000 subscribers, and created a KickStarter project so she could fund creation and distribution of the Self Journal: Your Daily Structure for Success.
She turned that small list into $40,000 in just 4 days, alerting them about her KickStarter program. She went on to do $322,000 on the basis of that 2,000 subscriber email list in 90 days.
These next examples are not small by some standards but if you are just starting out, can seem huge and impossible to get.
Internet marketer Jason Van Orden outsold other seasoned Internet marketing experts in a product launch affiliate competition with a list of 10,000. The other marketers he beat had lists of 90,000, 100,000 and more.
As you can see, you don’t need a large list to make money, you just need to have a good relationship with that list.
Over-deliver, always giving more than the people on your list expect.
Remember that these are human beings, and not just email addresses. Treat them accordingly.
Ask them what they want. Then give it to them. Build a great relationship with the people on your list and a small list can do surprisingly well.
Only sell or promote every 3 or 4 emails. Deliver quality content, and sales will take care of themselves.
Develop a set email schedule and stick to it. People love order, and get used to a regular, consistent delivery schedule. Your list subscribers can feel abandoned if you don’t reach out regularly, and that is no way to increase engagement.
This last was always difficult for me. I’d go great guns for a while and then I’d stop emailing for a while. I always found that my open rate dropped after I did that.
Now, I take a day and plan, create and load my regular emails in advance for the week for any one list and that seems to work well for me.
