Building a mailing list is essential to any business regardless of how they operate. Both online and offline businesses strive to grow there customer lists as big as possible. You see, when you have a list you can easily sell new products all the time. It's as easy as sending out an email blast and just like that, you have potentially earned hundreds even thousands of dollars overnight.

But building a customer list takes a lot of work and persistence. It is not something that can be done overnight and sometimes takes even years. I have been operating an online business for over 3 years and just had my online email list reach 100,000 people. My offline list is in excess of over 2 million but once again that took me over 10 years to grow.

You also need a proven system or marketing plan that you can use to grow your lists. I spent 1 year setting up a system that now brings in over 10,000 new emails addresses every month. There are many other ways as well. You can host a FFA, join a free viral program, start a newsletter or ezine, give out a free ebook/free report, or even spend money for lists. The key is having a auto-responder or group mailer that has a easy import and unsubscribe feature. You should set this up with all your marketing tools this way your efforts aren't wasted.

Let me explain the ways above which are only a few methods out of thousands that you can use:

1) Hosting An FFA

FFA stands for Free For All. It is normally a links page where other business people post there websites in hopes of getting free advertising for there products or programs. I'm sure you have tried this as well. This has been proven time and time again to be a waste of time. The only guarantee you get is that your email box will be full of sales messages from the owners of these FFA's. That is the key. You need to own an FFA in order to see results and grow your lists. Every time someone posts there link to your FFA, they automatically receive your pre-written sales messages to the email address they provide. This is what we call reverse marketing and it is responsible for millions and millions of dollars, of products and services sold on the internet today. There are a few companies out there that you can join that allows you to send your messages to around 50,000 people a month. Just do a search!

2) Viral Program

A viral program is a marketing tool that encourages people to pass along a marketing message to as many people as possible. The definition of viral marketing is promoting information or products that other people are compelled to give to other friends, colleagues and family. By definition viral marketing is a way to promote a service or product successfully. When done effectively one person will pass it on to several people who in turn will pass it on to several other people. This is what makes viral marketing so effective. For example, let me use an e-book that I wrote. If I forward that e-book to 10 people, who in turn forwarded that e-book to another 10 people. One hundred people have read that e-book. Now if it's forwarded that same way just four more times ONE MILLION PEOPLE have now read that same e-book. There are millions of viral programs out there that can really help you in growing your lists.

3) Newsletter/Ezine

Starting a newsletter or ezine is a great idea as well. The only problem is you need good quality material to send to your clients. You need free tools, articles, reports, e-books, and anything else you can find that really promotes others to join your lists for free. If people feel like you can supply them with great quality material, they will join your lists guaranteed. You can also run feature articles on some of your members and there businesses this way they feel like they are getting free advertising. With an ezine, once you grow it big enough and establish a good relationship with your clients, you can even charge to run solo ads. This is another source of revenue. Some people make a living on the internet just operating there ezines. Takes a lot of work but well worth it!

4) Free E-book or Report

This is a fantastic way to grow your lists. By giving away something that's free that everyone has use for, you almost instantly ensure your success in growing your lists. There are hundreds of thousands of e-books and reports you can give out for free to all your website visitors in order to get them into your lists. This has been proven to be an incredible marketing tool and will consistently bring you new clients in the thousands every week. I have created an amazing report that you can use for free if you decide to. You can get more information below! Make sure you have this method integrated into all your marketing and advertising efforts.!

5) Spending money to buy lists is the easiest method but it can prove to be very costly. And being the easiest doesn't necessarily guarantee results either. I wouldn't advise this method only because there are so many ways you can build a huge list even for free. If you become that desperate I guess you can try this method. I have gotten mixed reactions from people I have spoken to about this method. Some people it works for and others it doesn't. So you assume all the risk if you decide to go this route!

Once again, the most important aspect to your business like any other business is growing a list. This is vital to your success both short and long term. Make sure your efforts revolve around this at all times. You don't want to lose any potential future customers.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this article. Hopefully you use this information to your advantage.