It's common knowledge amongst internet marketers that if you want to make serious money online, you need to have your own email list of subscribers. To do this you need an autoresponder, as this will act as a complete list management solution, as I'm about to demonstrate in the remainder of this article.

An autoresponder is an invaluable tool to any webmaster who wants to make more money online. It allows you to add an opt-in form to your website or blog, so you can capture your visitors' name and email address. Once they opt-in they are automatically added to your list.

So if you offer a free bonus, mini-course or newsletter, for example, that will encourage your visitors to opt-in, you can start building a responsive list of subscribers who you can market your products to in the future (making sure you provide good content as well).

Most autoresponders make it very easy to create this opt-in form. You just customize it's look and appearance using the opt-in form generator provided, then simply copy and paste the html code into your website or blog.

So that's one benefit of an autoresponder, but that's just the beginning. A good autoresponder will also enable you to create and send as many messages to your subscribers as you want. All you do is log in to your account, write your message, and either broadcast it immediately, or schedule it to go out at a later date. You can also select individual groups of subscribers who will receive the message, which is useful for split-testing or for sending regional messages, for example.

The fact that you can schedule messages to go out at future dates also makes it very easy to create mini-courses, and if you want you could even create and schedule several months, or even years worth of messages, so your whole email marketing approach becomes completely automated.

So why choose an autoresponder and pay a small monthly fee, when you can use your own email server and handle it yourself?

Well this is another major benefit of an autoresponder because the largest and most reputable providers have very good relationships with the various email companies, which therefore means that the emails sent by the autoresponder company, and it's users, have very high delivery rates.

This is in stark contrast to self-run email servers, which have far worse delivery rates, and tends to get worse over time, as it only takes a few complaints from subscribers to get yourself blacklisted with the various email companies.

So to conclude, if you want to increase your chances of generating more profits from your websites and blogs, then you have to make full use of an autoresponder so you can follow up with your subscribers via email. This ensures that the visitors you receive are not lost forever when they leave your websites.