Email marketing

I consider myself a pretty good search engine marketer. I have a few sites that rank really highly on a few of the major search engines for some pretty competitive terms. I have been able to successfully monetize the traffic. I’ve successfully taught quite a few other people how to do what I do.

However, right now I’m lacking in an area. Email.

I have a site that has generated about 1,000 home based business leads over the past month. These are people who are ready to buy into some sort of home based business, or at least buy some information on how to start one. This is great and all…but I haven’t done a single thing with these leads. I haven’t sold them because I don’t really know how. I also haven’t started emailing them because I don’t know how.

Imagine the possiblities though. 1000 people who are ready to buy. I think the average person told me they have $50 to spend right now and somewhere between 5-10 hours per week to work on the business. If I knew how to successfully run a newsletter I bet I could get 10% of these people to buy something I promoted. If that something cost $50 and it was an affiliate program where I was making 40% commission on it, that’s 100 x 20 = 2,000…this week. That doesn’t include any products I could promote next week or the week after that or in a year. Also, that assumes that my sales letter isn’t very good and I only get 10% of people to buy what I’m promoting.

You get the point.

While Adsense has done me very well over the past few months, and will continue to do me well (hopefully) for a long time to come, and affiliate programs promoted through natural search results have done me better than adsense, I think it’s time to move on to a more profitable way of internet marketing. Email through opt-in newsletters.

I’m not talking about spam here. I’m talking about providing people with information that’s valuable and that they’re willing to give you their contact information for.

My problem is that I don’t know how to do this. I’m reading a few things right now on how to do it successfully. Does anyone have any suggestions or resources for me?