Your email list is one of the greatest assets you can build in your online business. It represents your audience; the people you can promote and sell products to, whether they're yours or someone else's. And one of the best ways to accumulate email address is to offer something of value and use an autoresponder to allow people to request it.

Autoresponders are simple signup forms you can add to your website where visitors can enter their name and email address to request a promised item. Autoresponders allow you to preprogram email messages that will go out automatically to those who fill out the form. And the emails you send out will give recipients an option opt out of the list whenever they like.

Autoresponders make email accumulation very easy for online businesses but the hard part is always getting people to sign up. Not only do they have to know an offer exists but it has to be enticing enough to motivate them to give you their email address. This article will look at three different ways to publicize your offer, providing the impetus for visitors to join your list.

The first obvious place to announce the availability of your offer is on your website. This may sound obvious but you might be surprised how many people have fantastic offers available but don't make them known to new visitors to their website. Your offer should be prominently displayed on your homepage so a visitor completely unfamiliar with your website would see it immediately.

When your offer is announced like this on your website, the trick reverts back to driving traffic to your site in general. There are many strategies for doing this including article marketing, posting on forums, starting a blog and leveraging social bookmarking services but those are beyond the scope of this article. The point is that a great website with a great offer but no traffic will leave you with nothing.

The second place you can publicize the availability of your offer is to contact group organizers in your field. Obviously, the offer must represent a terrific value for a group organizer to share it with his or her members. But if it is indeed a good offer, these organizers will be happy to share it. In addition, you can contact bloggers in your area and invite them to share the offer with their own audiences. If the offer is good, you could get plenty of exposure in a hurry.

The third strategy is the quickest but also the most expensive. You can rent someone else's list or do a joint venture, publicizing your offer to a large list someone else has already accumulated. This will cost you some money but you can generate a lot of interest in a single day, allowing you to build your own list quickly.

These list owners will never show you their list. They'll only send out an email on your behalf. Then, you'll end up getting the email addresses of those who accept your offer. You can then scrub future lists for the emails you already have and only pay for the remaining recipients. This strategy allows you to incrementally build up a list with consecutive offers.

Once you've decided on your offer, spend some time thinking about how you want to publicize its availability. The more people who know about it, the better. And if your offer is truly exceptional, you could end up with a huge email list overnight.