One of my friends mentioned that he’s built a list of 10,000 opt-in members into his mailing list within a period of 7 days…so what’s he supposed to do now, he asks.

I don’t think any responsible email marketer will give advice before finding out more information.

For example, how was the list built? Using PPC? Expired domain traffic? Co-reg traffic? Via opt-ins through Squidoo or HubPages? Via an article directory? As a result of a follow up/update list after buying a product (either an affiliate product or your own product).

Each of these channels comes with it’s own level of permission – and if you’re a permission-based marketer, you’ll realized that someone who’s just bought something from you has a higher level of loyalty and stickiness, compared to someone who’s just downloaded a free report off your site.

So back to the 10,000 mailing list – determine the source of list/lead generation is important. Are they emotionally invested in you? Have they spent money purchasing something you offer? Called into one of your teleseminars and stayed the full duration because they found the information compelling? Are they merely curious strangers? Or evangelists for your brand (also known as “raving fans”).

Once you’ve sorted that out, you need to figure out the demographics of your list too. What’s their geo-origin? US/Canada? Europe? Asia?

Obviously some forms of monetization will work better than others.

Pay-Per-Click Content Publishing: You probably would know that adsense publishing and CPC publishing is probably my least favorite source of monetization (mainly because you’re sending visitors AWAY from your site for $0.10 to $0.50 per click). So unless you’re generating a couple of hundred thousand uniques a month who come back repeatedly, it’s not going to be very viable.

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CPA Marketing: despite what you might hear, the bulk of revenue is still based in US/Canada for CPA/lead generation type monetization strategies. So you might have 30-50 offers that are “international” (even then a number of countries will be excluded), and there’s only so much you can do from Europe and Asia.

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Affiliate marketing/product sales: to do either of these well requires that you understand your list. This might include getting them to take a survey and compiling the demographic data. A good way to increase responsiveness for this is to offer some type of incentive. Maybe a $20 or $50 coupon in a mini-sweepstakes, valid at Amazon, iTunes, home depot or some site which is relevant to your list.

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The most important element I would suggest is to segregate your list into smaller sublists, especially if there’re multiple demographics in there – teens and babyboomers will have different interests and breaking the list into at least 2 different lists will have a huge impact on your conversions (just imagine having 10,000 keyphrases in a single adgroup…it doesn’t work does it? It’s a similar principle for email marketing too).

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Once you’ve got your lists broken up, work on your sales funnel and go beyond just promotion one ebook or service to that list. Ideally you’d want a funnel of multiple related and relevant products and services that you’d market to the list over the course of your relationship with them.

It’s all about the permission thing and if you’re speaking to their needs, there’s no reason why your list wouldn’t continue to generate the big bucks for you.

So think long term and the list will do well for you.

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On the choice of autoresponders: Aweber and GetResponse are the big ones. I personally prefer Aweber, and I know marketers who’re happy with GetResponse too.