I think I'll just keep it short so it can be as useful to novices as to the seasoned ones.

1. Publish a newsletter.

The idea is to keep your visitors informed about your products or services, while building your credibilility at the same time. This will also build you a long term relationship with your visitors.

2. Publish an affiliate newsletter.

This is to give them some tips, advice, and techniques they can use to promote your business. Don't forget to inform the current sales you're running and to provide them your best promotional stuff.

3. Sales automation.

Put your best proven ad to your messages. You may set another autoresponder address and put it in your ad. When visitors subscribe to that autoresponder, they'll be exposed to your marketing materials on particular products. Yhis will converts visitors a lot more into customers.

4. Distributing articles.

You can talk about your article when you finish writing it. It is best if you allow them to reprint these kind of articles in their own newsletter. This will bring you some additional traffic and even increase your credibility.

5. Write reviews.

You can write some reviews on other people's products and put each of them in an autoresponder. You can even review your own affiliate programs and patch your affiliate link to it.

6. Offer a product trial.

Give your visitors a sample of your ebook, script, membership, etc. In most cases, people given a taste will end up dying for the whole pie. Just don't forget to follow up and close the sale.

7. Distributing reports.

This way you're telling people in what field you're really good at and how great information you have that is worth their attention. These reports can be short though, as it is quality that you're going to show.

8. Distributing eCourse.

Set some lessons to be distributed in daily basis. Be sure not to put your blatant sales pitch here. Let the quality info you provide do the sales for you.

9. Selling advertising.

Sell some advertising space in you newsletter and promote it via the autoresponder itself.

10. Links of resources.

This contains up to twenty links that you picked up personally for your visitors to put into a good use. Make sure to add a bit of your own ad copy at the top or bottom.

So now you have the ideas of how autoresponders work as a system to bring you some fortune. Play with these ideas and you'll end up with your own creative usage of autoresponders!