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Building a subscriber list is an essential component of any truly successful Internet marketing business. There are a variety of ways to gain subscribers for your list, though not all of them are effective.

Purchased Leads: First on my list for low quality leads is email leads that you purchase through a list broker. You can expect to pay between $35 and $100 for a list of up to 20,000 names and email addresses through a list broker. Now, Affiliate Rocket chances of those leads being good and those people being interested in your Affiliate Finder are about 20,000 to 1. Pretty slim. Also, even if you are spam compliant, you have no guarantee that the list broker is, and you will get spam complaints on your emails.

Keep in mind that you do not know where these names and email addresses came from, whether these people agreed to be on a list, or agreed to have their contact information sold off. Would you do that? Do you have nothing better to do than to sit around and receive pitches for every random product under the sun? Neither does anybody else.

If these lists were really full of good qualified leads, why would these companies be selling them to you instead of marketing to them themselves? On average, a good responsive list is worth no less than $1.00 per month per subscriber. Who would sell you a list worth $20,000 per month for $35.00? You need to avoid these companies at all costs. The spam complaints alone will put you out of business. They will get your email account closed, your web hosting canceled, and you in serious legal trouble.

Another one that I have seen recently is an offer from someone to sell me 10,000 names off their list for $150.00 because their list is “so big that they don’t have time to Affiliateundercover care of it”. Same questions as above. The only person making any money off of these lists is the guy selling them to the poor, gullible, aspiring Internet marketer who doesn’t know any better.

If you are serious about building a real business and a real income online, then please, please, please do not fall for this garbage. It may mean that you are stuck at that J.O.B. for a while longer while you build your business the right way, but believe me, you would have been anyway.

Another source of low quality leads is safe lists. A safe list is a network of marketers who have all agreed to receive advertising from each other, and view the advertisements in order to earn points they can redeem for the right to send out their own ad. Sounds like a good idea on the surface, but realize that all of these other marketers are not focused on how to solve the problem you may have the solution Autoresponder they are concerned with racking up enough points to be able to send their ads to you.

Unless you can offer them the absolute ”latest and greatest, 8th wonder of the world” product, there is a slim to none chance that they will even read your ad, let alone take it seriously, sign up for your list, click on your link, or whatever it is you are asking them to do.

Safe lists are a great way to make your hit counter go up, but not a great way to find prospective customers. I have heard some of the gurus say otherwise, but I think they may have better luck than most with safe list marketing due to the name recognition and clout that they have in the industry.

The third source of poor traffic and opt-ins I have found is traffic exchanges. I mention them here, in part because they are very popular right now, and it seems I am getting solicitations for a new traffic exchange almost daily. If you have used traffic Add audio myspace and have had good results, then please realize that the following comments are based solely on my own experience.

Traffic exchanges, for the most part, suffer from the same problems as safe lists. About the only advantage I can see in traffic exchanges is that most of them offer an upsell where for a price you can bypass the surfing Affiliate Rocket and purchase the right to email a certain number of subscribers. When somebody makes one of these purchases, whoever referred them to the site makes a commission. You can make a little money by promoting traffic exchanges, but as I explain below, you will not be doing your customers much of a favor by doing so.

Sure, there is a good likelihood that a small percentage of the keyword helper software of either a safe list or a traffic exchange may be in the market for what you have to offer, but how much time are you going to spend reading ads, or visiting sites to rack up the points to have your ad displayed and find these people? What is your time worth to you. The hours spent in either Safe Lists or Traffic Exchanges would be much better spent writing articles, posting to your blog, or adding relevant content to your web site. These investments of your time will do far more to drive traffic to your site and subscribers to your list by increasing your search engine ranking, and establishing you as a credible source of information in your niche.

J. Toney has worked in sales and marketing for 18 years, and has been a part time Internet Marketer since 1998. He operates several web sites, including http://www.jtoneypublishing.com, a site dedicated to helping budding internet entrepreneurs piece together the internet marketing puzzle.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 6:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.