If you want to make money online, you have to build a mailing list. No matter what the sales pages say, the bottom line is you need to have someone to sell to in order to make sales. This is why there are so many free reports, eBooks, newsletters etc. online, to get your coveted email address and permission to send you offers.

If a mailing list is the key to making money on the internet, then why do some internet marketers still go for the quick affiliate sale? Possibly they are too focused on short term results, or they don’t know how to go about building a list.

We have all seen the claims of making huge money online, but how is that possible? The simple answer is with multiple mailing list and multiple subscribers. Let’s say over time you develop a list with 5000 people that have signed up and are looking for Internet business opportunities. You could then develop your own product, or decide to market someone else’s product to your list. If your profit is $20 per sale, and you convert 5%, you would make $5,000 for one sale. Now imagine that you could do that month after month with this built in customer base.

I know this example is simple, I know if you are not currently developing your list it may seem to be an impossible task. I also know that most of the internet marketing experts will tell you they make their money from their mailing list, and most have five or more lists.

Success leaves clues, the clue to making money on the internet is persistence and, like any other business, hard work. The benefit will come from the work if you persist, start building your list today, the long term benefits will more than pay for the effort.

One easy way to create a list is by Blogging on your niche of choice. You can create a Blog free in some cases, but it is best to self host your blog. Once you start putting valuable content into your Blog, on whatever topic you choose, people will read and sign up for your list. It may not happen overnight, but it will happen. I have used my Blog to create one of my lists, and based on my experience, list building is the best way to make money on the Internet yet.

Rob Emmerson is recognized as leading expert in SEO and has written extensively on the subject in articles and eBooks. He offers a free step by step SEO Course at http://www.theseosecretrevealed.com . In addition he writes a daily SEO Blog at http://www.robemmerson.com where he shares tips and tricks to improve your SEO.

How many sites do you own, where the traffic generated from long tail keywords far exceeds that of the main keyword? I know personally about 60% of my sites gain most of their traffic through their long tails as opposed to their mains. Therefore how can we exploit the long tail keywords of individual niches in a way that will maximize traffic without spamming the search engines?

So What Are Long Tail Keywords?

Long tail keywords are basically keywords that contain the main keyword(name of the niche) plus other words. For example if the main keyword was ‘cosmetic surgery’ an example of a long tail would be ‘cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles’.

So What’s So Great About Long Tails?

Good question and the answer has to do with their level of competitiveness. Most long tail keywords are linked with low competition in the search engines. Well you may think “so what, hardly anyone searches for ‘cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles’ or ‘dog training in Montana’”. You’re right, but what if you had 50 pages that all targeted different long tail keywords? Let’s say the average amount of visitors that one of those keyword brings in a month is 100. Multiply that by 50 and you’ve got 5000 unique’s each and every month.

Now tell me this, how hard do you think it would be to rank for those keywords? Easy! That’s right, most long tail keywords are incredibly easy to rank for in the search engines. In fact on many occasions all that’s required would be to upload a page that has content targeted towards a long tail and as soon as it’s gets indexed, you may find it ranking on the first page immediately.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should forget about targeting your main keyword and just focus on the long tails. By all means you should still have a page – usually your home page – that targets the main keyword for your niche, but you have to realize that almost all of the time it’s going to require a lot of SEO before you see any real traffic coming from that particular keyword. So, why not at the same time, build pages that will gain traffic faster and act as window pages into the main heart of your website?

So what do I do if I don’t have time to write 50 pages worth of content?

PLR Content to the Rescue

Right now PLR content is easily the best way of exploiting the long tails of any particular niche. Why? Well depending on the type of PLR content you have at your disposal, most PLR articles are written based around specific long tail keywords. That means you will be able to build pages that have content specifically optimized for individual long tail keywords, which the search engines will absolutely love! If you don’t want to spend a lot of time writing article after article on topics like ‘dog training in Montana’ or ‘lip eczema relief’ and you can’t afford to pay someone to write these articles for you, PLR content is the solution you are looking for.