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Micro-list building and marketing is creating small lists of very targeted and very interested prospects for your products and services. Instead of concentrating your marketing efforts on building large general lists, you create hundreds, even thousands of micro-lists directly related to the product or service you're promoting.

This is not exactly breaking news, savvy online marketers have been sub-dividing their lists into smaller micro-lists for years. It is a simple way of getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

Many of these marketers create an "A" list which may consist of their most responsive contacts, usually customers who have bought from them before, or affiliates who have joined the marketer's affiliate program. They even divide those lists further, such as a micro-list of your top 50 affiliates.

Micro-list building is only slightly different in that your original goal or aim is to build a small targeted list directly related to a product or service so that you can send follow-up information. It often means writing a separate tailor-made AR series of emails for each product or service you're promoting.

The objective of this follow-up is to establish a friendly business-like relationship with your potential customers. Keep the emails objective and give helpful information, buying tips, reviews... but don't be all positive, if there are any complaints/negatives against a product or service give these to your subscribers. Any support issues should be thoroughly dealt with and discussed.

Why go through all this trouble? Mainly because, like long tail keyword marketing, using a micro-list will be much more targeted and much more effective. You are fine-tuning your marketing to target the right customers for your product or service; then creating custom information that will better convince that potential customer to buy from you.

Granted, since we are talking about affiliate marketing here, writing an AR series for each product or service you promote can be a massive chore. And you may have to do extra filtering on your AR forms or do other surveys to find the best prospects. However, what I have found is that once you have these plugged into your AR system (I use Aweber which gives you unlimited campaigns) you can virtually forget about them, no pun intended.

By using these micro-lists you can create hundreds of automatic marketing systems that are selling your products 24/7, day in, day out. Again, this is not exactly breaking news, many companies who use affiliates to sell their products already have their own AR follow-ups... I always first check to see if the company has their own system and use that one. If it's not effective, even big companies get it wrong sometimes... I do an AR series of my own and see if it can perform better. Sometimes, input from a third-party source is better received, especially if that person uses and recommends the product.

Micro-list building is one of the most effective online marketing tools you can use. Quite frankly, I have found building a large opt-in list is not the real key to creating online income but instead creating small micro lists for each of your promoted products to be much more effective. You can have hundreds, even thousands of these different micro-lists.

Studies have shown, interested customers may not buy on the first visit, that it may take up to six or seven reminders. So keeping in contact with an interested customer, one who is looking and in the right mindset to buy, will definitely increase your sales.

Here, rather then the hard-sell, the emphasis should be on collecting contacts in order to give them helpful informative content on the product they're interested in buying. Supplying quality content should be your main goal, let the selling take care of itself. If you get the first part right, the sale will come naturally.

Micro-list building and marketing gives you the perfect opportunity to reach your potential customers time and time again. It extends your sales pitch and truly gives you an opportunity to gently persuade the customer to buy. The real money is in the Micro-List!