Bum marketers who want to take their game to the next level, without incurring significant cost, should start email marketing. It’s the next logical step in the process of becoming an online emperor. There is an old saying that "The Money is In the List" and that cliche started for good reason. A receptive mailing list is arguably the most valuable thing you can own online.

It’s going to be a slow, steady process to build a mailing list. It might take you a couple of years to get it up over 5,000 where the real money is. That’s OK, just start building it now. Think of it as a retirement account that you need to save for - and that really is an appropriate analogy! Once you own a large list that trusts you, just about anything you decide to promote will result in a flurry of instant affiliate commissions.

Think ahead as you start to build your list. It will be difficult to manage down the line if you go about it half-ass. Sure you can start by simply adding contacts to your free email account such as Yahoo, but back up the addresses offline early and often. When you have more than a couple hundred names you will need to get them into a mailing list service provider.

Personally I use aweber.com to run my mailing lists and highly recommend it. You can set up pre-arranged sequential messages and then broadcast email your entire list anytime you want. They provide easy forms to add to your web pages (just copy and paste the html code) for getting signups to you list automatically, 24/7. Because they are a leader in this space, there are many external programs created for backing up and organizing your aweber lists.

So how do you start? Well if your subject is something interesting that your target visitors would conceivably want more info or frequent updates, just offer a free newsletter. If not, give away a free ebook or software product via email and then provide 7 free tips on the subject in follow-up emails. That usually works pretty good.

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