No Short Cuts To Building An Email List

There are so many offers these days online to help build a hyper-responsive email list.

Let's take a brief look at some of the 'offers' I have recently come across

Buying email lists. The offer usually is for a few thousand emails. The list is usually said to come from people who have opted in for more information. Problem is they didn't opt in to your email list. So why should they take your emails seriously. Or even open them at all.

The other concern is the distinct possibility that these lists are from email scrapers. These are software that go to sites where members have there email addresses and harvest all the addresses from that site. For example a popular forum.

Safelists. These are lists that contain the emails of people who have joined the list. The purpose of joining the list is to have access to the email addresses of the other people on the list. Some safelists are free and others paid.

But if everyone on the list is just there so that they can send their marketing or promotional emails to everyone else on the same email list, where's the market? You are all sellers and you need buyers to make a business work. Now some people swear by safelists but to me... well you know what I think

List training material. Some list building training material is good. Really good, I used one of these training videos to get me on my feet in the email list building department. But there are some rogues out there. They promise to teach you how to explode your email list. Or how to get a large click through on your emails guaranteed. Or some other marketing hype. My concern is with this valuable training, 'how come it's being sold for $7?' And Guaranteed is one marketing buzz word that is sure to make me wary.

The honest truth is there are no short cuts to building a responsive email list. You just have to put the work in.