Ever heard that phrase before. This comes from marketers, on the internet it refers to a list of email addresses who can become customers. How does it work? Well first of all you have to sign up to some kind of Autoresponder service which charges a monthly fee, could be anything from 10 to 20 dollars. Now here you set up an email series with sales letters of the product or products you are selling and send these to your list which is handled by the autoresponder. But you have to get people to sign up to your list, how do you do this? You advertise all over the internet using paid ads, Facebook or other social media, traffic exchanges and all other advertising media you can find, and you place an ad where you offer a freebie, could be an e book, in exchange for the inquirers email address, of course there is an opt out feature on your autoresponder.
Sounds good so far right? Well I personally don’t like it, first of all I will not only send you one email, I will be sending you emails on a constant basis offering you one product or another which in reality makes me a spammer even if people who use this say you authorized them to email you when you gave them your email. Another thing is I will most probably opt out of your list as soon as I receive your free product, so that would be a waste of time.
And then I think this comes out to being like a pyramid scheme, because the idea is the following, you are tapping a market of 3 billion people who are using the internet. But of these at least 2 billion just have access, they have no money to buy and probably don’t even have a credit card, that leaves 1 billion, of these probably half have no intention of ever buying anything on the internet, worse if it’s source is an email from someone they don’t even know. So that leaves a 500 million person market, but to sell them something you have to know what they want and that they are willing to buy it at the time they receive your email.
And the hardest thing is there are millions of marketers who are competing for these customers, so to me this "money is in the list" is a suckers game. Sure there are people who make money, but they spend thousands maybe tens of thousands of dollars to sell enough to make a living, there are a few who become rich, but mostly these guys are just promoting the idea of yourself becoming rich through ebooks, courses and other schemes they are selling.
Then the other aspect is they tell you your list is yours forever and will continually be making you money, but is this true? Most probably people will eventually send your emails to the spam folder and your emails will be seen by no one. Only people with huge lists do make money, but as I told you to get lists as large as these you have to spend thousands.
So over all I don't think getting involved with email marketing will make you money, I see so much more future in crypto currencies.