Business Ideas: How would you turn an email mailing list with 100 000 members (knowing exactly where each of them lives and what they are interested in), into a reliable passive income stream?

Sell the list to other businesses (that's if you didn't agree to not do that). If you can prove the legitimacy of the 100,000 emails you could get a lot of money for the list.

Create a product that at least 1% of them will want and sell it to them.

One way. Create a reason for these people to go to a website you will create. Take the numbers to the advertisers and income will start coming. Businesses  would advertise on your site. That is one way.

There are a lot of people who purchase lists and then set about trying to get the members to buy stuff - people are a lot more canny, wary and wise to this these days. You will have to build some kind of a trustful relationship with them, you will have a proportion unsubscribe each month so attrition will be a factor. What most novice email marketers do is either grab email message 'swipes' from more experienced marketers - these are invariably generic in nature and have a very poor conversion rate less than 1%. Or they have a crack themselves and try to be 'Mr Niceguy' to all the members - this also is dismal in results. What is the best way? Entertain your list with some cracking messages which builds an authentic story, depending on the 'niche' of the list (this is going to determine your whole approach) you need to stand out as a genuine voice, otherwise you will just be yet another 'vanilla' selling voice - not good. Be yourself, and choose affiliate products that are genuinely good and add value to people's lives. This makes the whole affair a lot easier, and you can feel good about yourself, and derive a much fatter income. Don't try to please everyone, and develop good writing skills. ALL buying choices are emotional in nature, so you must develop the talent of triggering emotional responses. You can also sell email delivery for other email marketers, so-called 'solo mail' - people make handsome profits from selling 'clicks' -you are essentially selling targeted traffic for other marketers - as long as the list is responsive. Best of luck.

You may know everything about them, but they don't know anything about you.  Getting a random person on the internet to trust you is pretty difficult.  So for that reason, an e-mail list of people is about as valuable as a phone book.Even if you make the most perfect message to "blast" out to 100,000 strangers, most likely, 50,000 will get it in their inbox, 10,000 people will open it, 2,000 people will read it, 1,000 will actually care and engage in the content, 500 people will click, and about 2.7 people will buy something.  But then you will have a new problem.  Many of the people that you did get through to on the first time will flag the message as spam, and you will have a very hard time getting any other messages out to anyone.  Even people who may have wanted to hear from you will not because the rules on their incoming server will automatically bounce the message.You would probably need to run your own SMTP server because services like mailchimp, iContact, and Emma will not even allow a mass import like that.  And if they do, they will want to see a reasonable response from a small sample before they will allow you to send to the entire list.You are better off creating a product first, and they growing a list of people who actually want to hear from you.  I know I sound like a pessimist, but I'm speaking from experience.  A large e-mail list feels like you are sitting on a gold mine, but unsolicited e-mails simply don't work, and do more damage to your brand than good.

You need to: 1. Get them to trust you 2. Get them to like you 3. Get them to buy from you. Then 4. Get them to give you money every month. There are many ways I know to do this, with 100,000 you can make 20-50k per month depending on your market. What you need to look out for is that you don't burn the list out. Okay now What to Do: Stop thinking (how can i make x from this list). Change that mindset to: These are 100,000 friends of mine. They are at Point A They want to be at Point B And make sure everything you offer them moves them forward. Balance free stuff with paid stuff just make sure you only offer them things that help them.... Even if you don't make money on everything you offer them, the idea is to get them to trust you and value you. You will screw this up obviously because you haven't done this before. But just keep this in mind and you'll still make a boatload of money. The Tactics: This is just 1 of the tactics I would use, but hey, I can only reveal my entire war chest to my clients. Survey your list... Tell them you want to make a few cool products for them and you would like to know what they want. Reveal the result of the survey to them a few days later and give something (free product, video, etc) Use that survey to make or licence a product. Offer that product to them Create a continuity program (a monthly membership site or something similar) For everyone that buys, give them an "exclusive" opportunity to join this "private" membership site. Do a promotion like this every month but make sure you give them at least 3 valuable free products for every product you ask them to buy Offer your continuity program to every buyer, but Make sure that membership site is exclusive to your buyers (never offer it to the public, to keep it exclusive), and they only have a few days after buying something from you to join. There are very many ways to make this process more effective  but if you just do this, you'll make a killing. A word of warning:  The day you start promoting "shitty" products to your list is the day your business will start to die. Be careful... Never Ever let this happen. :) Happy Marketing.