Being a conscientious entrepreneur, I have explored many ways to advertise the products that I sell. 
One thing that is consistently recommended by most marketing Gurus is that to be successful, you must start to build your own list of email addresses.  An opt-in email list of your very own!

This is a list of people who for some reason or another have accepted your offer to send them advertising material, be it a bi-weekly newsletter, monthly ezine or just occasional snippets of news about something they are interested in.
They are members of your opt-in mail list.
They are usually given the choice of cancelling their subscription to your newsletter (opting out) at any time.

So I started out building my list, one by one, day by day adding 2 or maybe even 3 email addresses to my list.
These were people who had shown some faith in buying one of my products. Having recorded their names and email addresses, I ventured to send them my monthly ezine. 
I launched my monthly ezine with enthusiasm and a feeling of optimism. Wow, I sent it out to my huge list of 60 subscribers including friends and relatives.

Thankfully very few people have cancelled their subscriptions. The friends and rellies dare not!  It's possible that they simply delete my email each month and don't bother to unsubscribe. I don't get any feedback and I assume that is a sign of disinterest or plain apathy.

The list was growing, but at 2 or 3 a day, I was starting to get impatient.
So when I saw the advertisement "build your email list for 10 Cents per address" I took a second look..  The advertiser "blah_blahlists.com" were offering to send me thousands of fresh new opt-in ezine subscribers every month who were hungry for my products and would just love to receive my free ezine.

Well, I signed up immediately and was delighted to receive a huge list of email addresses which I added to the paltry list that I had gathered over previous months.
I gloated over the now fattened list like Mr Bean with his Xmas turkey. I Checked the number of addresses daily, rubbed my hands together and hummed with glee!

A month went by with monthly billing being less than $100 and I felt quite pleased with myself, thinking of all the sales I was going to make.  Although I already owned a mail program capable of handling my email, I continued to enter all email addresses by hand.

I have already suffered so many disappointments with scams on the Internet, I became suspicious when I saw the many unusual email addresses with strange names and a large proportion included unwieldy numbers. Who would ever have a regular email address like booboo328675@monkeys.uncle.com
Many of the  addresses seemed to mock me with their words. 
Many addresses were formatted like: 
money4meubozo@easymoney.com 
easybux@cashmail55.com
veryfunny56@forme.getaway.net
usuck4us@aol.com 
uloser26435@lostmail.com
buzzfly3651@outdoor.zip.com
yobblburst99@popmail.com

After the first "big" mailout to nearly one thousand "opt-in" subscribers, I received an avalanche of returned email stating "mail box full" or "user not found".  Then I remembered seeing the ads that typically read "make money by reading email" ..     and then it dawned on me.
Thousands of busy bees are out there, signing up to receive emails using monstrous numbers of free email accounts, opened with false names. The popular ones being with AOL, YAHOO and HOTMAIL. 

Opt-in ezine list sellers are paying them a proportion of their income to pretend to be opt-in subscribers.  Actually I believe many ezine list sellers are actually creating a proportion of the opt-in lists themselves.  It would not be difficult to do if you were dishonest.

Being an optimist or fool I thought "oh well what's a hundred less out of a thousand, I can make that up 5 times over with next months new opt-in list" I was assuming that a large proportion of the subscribers were genuine.
The following month was even worse, more returned emails, more users not found etc.  I decided to cancel my order for more addresses. 
Month after month my opt-in email list has shrunk away as all those addresses I had originally purchased became un-reachable in some way.

Many optimistic entrepreneurs are falling into the same trap, wasting huge amounts of money in a vain and impatient attempt to build their opt-in lists.  I believe many entrepreneurs have systems that are on auto and are unaware of what is happening. 
My advice is don't bother buying opt-in lists unless they can be guaranteed to be all genuine.  Don’t ask me how to prove it.

The only way I know, which is also flawed to a degree is to offer things for free on the Web.  FREE is the operative word in advertising. People are so spoiled these days, they always expect something for nothing.  I give away a free MIDI-eBook. Many people come to my website, take the free gift and leave a false email address!  Fortunately there are many honest people who leave their genuine email address. 

I think it's time to pull out that email program and stop worrying. 
I'll just concentrate on my genuine new subscribers.
As with most things in life, to be successful - there is no easy way, just the hard way or the smart way. 
Buying Opt-in lists is not the smart way.

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Dr John Flynn publishes a monthly HTML ezine called:
"The Xerostar Times" and his motto is:
"caring for creative people"
You can subscribe at: 
http://www.xerotron.com/cgi-bin/mail/mail.cgi
His free eBook "The Xerotron Story" is available at:
http://midi-ebooks.com 
mailto: xerostar@iinet.net.au

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