One of the things that you hear quite often from internet marketers is about the power of the list.

List? What list?

The list is your list of all of the people who have signed up to read your newsletter.  The list is one of the most important aspects of your online business.

The list is made up of all of those people who comprise your target market.  OK, well not all of them, not yet, but getting to know the people on your list is a good way to get to know your target market.

So how do you get people on your list?

You need a few things:

• A way to collect the names and email addresses
• A way to send out your newsletter
• Something of value (a free gift) that will get people to sign up for your list

The first two things on the list can be covered with an autoresponder.  An autoresponder lets you write and send newsletters and emails to your list.  It will also help you collect the names and email addresses and keep track of them for you.

There are a lot of autoresponders out there, and many of them are free.  There is only one, however, that you should be using: Aweber.

Aweber is very inexpensive – less than $20 per month.  Aweber is extremely reliable and it is the only autoresponder that you will ever need.

Trust me on this, please.  You won’t regret it.

You see, when people tried to tell me to start with Aweber, I didn’t listen.  I used another program instead that didn’t offer me as much as Aweber did and cost just a little bit more.  How dumb was that?

By the time I finally figured out that Aweber was the better deal, I had over 700 subscribers on my list with the other company.

And since it’s not ethical to just transfer people over from one list to another, I had to ask them all to re-subscribe.  I lost a lot of people that way and there was no need for it.

So trust me when I say, start with Aweber and you won’t regret it.  It’s the service that people making the big dollars online use.  Pay attention next time someone asks you for an email address to sign up for a newsletter.  You’ll see who’s using what.

Signing up for your autoresponder is step one in harnessing the power of the list.  Next time, we’ll talk about how to get those names and addresses.