Friday, November 30, 2007

Collecting Opt-In Email Addresses

Email is still the most popular and most used communication medium on the Internet. It’s also an efficient way to distribute your message to large numbers of people who have requested that information. As a form of marketing, it generates high response rates and gives you measurable results with instant feedback.


Just keep in mind, it is never acceptable to send commercial email to people who haven’t requested to receive email from you. Bust that rule, and there’s a good chance you’ll be out of business. That gives you the challenge of building up a list of willing subscribers. When you’re first starting out, there’s often a temptation to simply purchase an opt-in email list. Lots of people sell them and you can easily pick up a million or so addresses for just a few bucks. But while that may appear to be a fast, easy way to build up customers, the names on the list may not be up to date and they are not even opt-in contacts at all. To say it bluntly, emailing people from a list like that is called spamming.

Similarly, there are also programs that automatically crawl the web, recording every email address they find. These will let you quickly build up a huge list of email addresses. But, nobody will thank you when you stuff their inboxes with marketing material. Forget about them; they’re not worth the effort. It’s much safer, and much more effective, to take the time to build your own real opt-in list. TIP: I’ll teach you how to build your own opt-in list the right way and give you all the tools you need to make money with your list. Click here to learn how I can help you make money online.

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