A big focus with internet marketing is to drive traffic to your website and to find unique visitors and new customers. Of course this is vital to the long term survival of the business. But what is often neglected, is making the most of the visitors and customers that you already have. You can earn extra money online by following up with your current customers and subscribers, and maximising the profit potential from them.

It's always cheaper to sell to existing customers than it is to go out and find new ones. Probably the best and easiest way to achieve this is through email marketing. It's well known that most people need to be exposed to your message or product 7 times before they take action and purchase. And once your subscribers make a purchase and become your customer, they are then much more likely to make follow-up purchases. It's all about building trust and credibility.

Okay, to be able to follow up with your list of subscribers and customers, you will need an autoresponder account. Here you can set up the content, follow up messages, and the schedule of which days the emails are to go out. Once set-up, your list will continue to get your messages automatically, which allows you to keep feeding them the benefits of your product or service. You can also add new messages at any time to the autoresponder series, or make one-off broadcast messages to your entire list if you have any special announcements.

Most good autoresponder services will allow you to easily separate your lists so that you can have different lists for subscribers and customers. This allows you to tailor certain products and offers to the right audience.

Once you have things set-up in your autoresponder account, you can then copy some HTML code for your opt-in box, and insert in your web pages, blogs and lead-capture pages. If you have reasonable amounts of traffic flowing to your sites, and if you give your visitors a good reason to join your list (offer free bonuses), over time you'll end up with a huge number of loyal subscribers and customers that you can follow-up with for as long as they stay subscribed. The alternative, if you don't have an opt-in box, is that people land on your site, leave, forget all about your site, and never return again. Not good.

When you have a good list of subscribers and customers, make sure that you keep them on your list by continually offering them good content and great value. Giving them more content than sales pitches is very important to maintain their loyalty. When you sell them affiliate products, make sure that you have some experience with the product and you know that your list would benefit greatly from purchasing it.

Most of the profit comes after the first sale to your customer. The profit comes from the multiple sales to each individual customer. The only way to facilitate this is to offer excellent value and content, and to continue following-up with them. Initially, there is a bit of work in setting-up your email campaign, but once this is done, it really is a lazy way to earn extra money online.