The biggest mistake I made when building my blog was waiting so long to start building an email list. For a while I was under the assumption that just having a website or blog and daily visitors was enough, but boy was I wrong. No example better illustrates the power of email lists than my success (and non-success) with affiliate marketing over the previous years. During the first years of my blogging I'd write a review of a product that I'd promote with my affiliate link, stick it up on my blog and watch a handful of sales trickle in over the following week. It was a painfully slow response rate and I just didn't sell many products that way. A short year later, I had built an email list so I started combining my blog with the list. I'd write a review to my blog AND write an email to my list telling people about the review. WOW, what a difference. Now I'd receive a rush of sales within the first 24 hours because people read email much more frequently than they read blogs and I'd do about three times as many sales when combining the two mediums. Not only that - you should see what happens when you sell your OWN products through your list and your blog. You always sell more of your own stuff than affiliate products, so when you can write multiple blog posts and multiple emails to promote your latest offer, it's like a license to print money. Why does this combination work so much better? Because you are increasing the exposure points you have with your audience. They get the email and the blog posts, which increases the conversion rate.