Taking ClickBank's excellent stable of quality eBooks and other digital download products as an example, this is why I think list growing can sometimes be counterproductive for affiliates:

* There may be too few products to warrant making regular mailings to a specific audience. You won't run out of products to sell to eBay enthusiasts, or online marketers in general, but as a ClickBank only affiliate (like me and many thousands more people worldwide) you wouldn't get too much mileage out of a mailing list of potential snake charmers or belly dancers (just one ClickBank product), people wanting to overcome their fear of spiders (currently just one ClickBank product) or desiring to sell autographs on eBay (currently nothing suitable on ClickBank).

* Potential buyers might have an urgent need which, once resolved, takes them outside a specific market place. They may want to remove warts quickly or cure bad breath or get over a death in the family. Problems like that don't last forever, thankfully, and just one good information product might be all your person with a problem really needs. These people want to buy right away, they do not want to join a mailing list that might, only might, address their problems sometime soon.

* It isn't good to have all your eggs in one basket. Say, for example, you've grown your list to promote purely books about making money on eBay, or AdSense, or AdWords. You work for months, building a list, making good profits, then all of a sudden one of those companies loses popularity or is overtaken by a rival company and people on your mailing list suddenly lose interest in your product range. What might happen for example, if ClickBank drops a specific product or marketplace category, the very one you spend your working life marketing, what use is your mailing list then? Okay, I know that's an extreme scenario but similar things have happened, such as when Yahoo closed its auction forum, ClickBank dropped some data entry and mailing list programmes, AdWords stopped advertisers promoting sites selling aristocratic titles and doctorates, eBay banned sales of digital products. It happens! Taking a more diversified approach to product selection circumvents most of these problems.
 

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