I love getting emails. Those little texts in my inbox, sometimes they contain gems that leave me motivated to write back, and sometimes they are just noise. But no matter what, I always check my inbox regularly to see what’s new.

I had a customer ask me about using email to promote their product, and since I already love getting emails, I decided to give it a try. The results of my marketing experiment – which involved sending out 1000+ emails over the course of a month – revealed three things.

Don’t Think Of Email As ‘Spamming’

Before you put this article down, I want you to think about email in the worst possible way: as “spam”. When you receive spam, you know it instantly. Those messages are often accompanied by a large amount of spammy links and are generally filled with advertisements (to generate revenue for the site).

Let’s face it though, a lot of email is spam. The key is to stop thinking about email in the same way.

If you want to be an aggressive email marketer, you need to step out of the spam trap, and you can do this in a number of ways. Firstly, you can make money from affiliate marketing, which isn’t actually marketing at all, but instead selling a product or service that’s associated with an advertised product. When a user clicks a link in your email and makes a purchase, you’re paid a commission. Sounds pretty good right? It is, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Make Sure Your Emails Are Useful

In my example above, I used email to promote a product that I believed could be useful to my readers. When you’re sending out promotional emails, you need to make sure that your audience actually wants or needs what you’re selling. In my case, the product I promoted was a tool that could help my readers automate web content curation, which I felt was a valuable service.

If your email doesn’t provide value, why should anyone care about what you have to say? What is the use of your email if no one wants to read it? You need to put yourself in your reader’s shoes and ask: what is useful to them?

Even more importantly, you need to ask yourself: is this email going to help me get closer to my goal? Is this email going to make me more money? If your email doesn’t provide value to your reader, why should they even care about what you have to say? The best kind of marketing emails are those that provide value to the reader, and once you establish yourself as an expert in your industry, you can use your email to promote almost anything.

Focus On Quality Over Quantity

The second most important thing that my experiment revealed was the need to focus on high-quality content when promoting a product or service. To be an aggressive online marketer, you need to understand the value of creating quality content and the ramifications of flooding your reader’s inboxes with generic promotional emails.

When I was first getting started, I thought that just because I had a blog that people would automatically want to read my content. I quickly learned that this was far from true. My first piece of advice to anyone who wants to become an aggressive online marketer would be to make sure that your content is of a high quality.

If you want to gain a following and eventually make money online, you need to understand the value of having a strong following. Once you have a strong following with a large amount of engaged readers, you can use your blog to promote any product or service that you want. When you have a large audience, you can experiment with the quantity of emails you send out and determine what works best for you.

Email Marketing Is A Long-Haul Process

The third most important thing that my experiment revealed is the need to view email marketing as a long-haul process. It takes time for your content to gain popularity and for people to start caring about what you have to say. To get back to my example above, it took about 30 days for the automated web content curation tool that I promoted in my email to get about 200 clicks/day, and about 90 days for the number of daily clicks to reach about 400. After about a month, the number of daily clicks had reached about 600, and after two months, I had doubled my initial number of daily clicks. (These numbers are from my blog’s analytics, which I recommend you check out if you’re wondering about the performance of your own blog or website.)

So if you want to be an aggressive online marketer, it’s important to remember that you’re not going to see instant results. You’re going to have to put in the work to gain credibility and eventually start seeing results from your efforts.

If you want to be seen as an expert in your industry, make sure to follow and connect with people in your niche. Doing this will give you the opportunity to showcase your expertise and hopefully earn you a few extra bucks along the way.