One of the benefits of using the Internet to build an online business is you can automate many of the daily functions. One area that this is really true is when you build a list of prospects using an autoresponder. You do this to send out e-mails to interested prospects. Let's take a look at how to automate your email marketing efforts and in the process free up your time to do other things in your business.

The best way to automate your business with email marketing is to use a quality auto responder. A couple that come to mind are Aweber and Get Response. These autoresponder's will do anything that you tell them to do.

You can use your autoresponder to immediately send out information that people request from you. You do this by asking them to give you their contact information in exchange for the information you are providing.

One great way to build an email marketing business is to pre-program your autoresponder with an ongoing series of messages. You might go so far as to call this a newsletter, and set it up to publish on a weekly basis.

You could provide a series of tips and program your autoresponder to have 52 messages already set up. Of course the hard part is getting it set up, but once you do it is a very automated way to build your business.

In your tips newsletter, you can also include links to various products that you represent that would interest your readers. You can quickly find products to sell around the tips that you provide in the newsletter by joining various affiliate programs.

Once you have everything set up, you can spend 100% of your time driving traffic to your autoresponder address. One way to do that is to build a landing page with a sign-up form on it.

You would need to have a hosting account, and also buy a domain name for your landing page. Another thing you could do is to sign up for a free blog at Blogger.com, and just promote that URL as well. You could put a sign-up form so that it's on every page that you build your blog with.

In summary, automating your e-mail marketing efforts is a very smart way to make money on the Internet. Concentrating the majority of your time on generating traffic will separate you from your competition, because most websites do not get the proper amount of traffic that they need to stay in business.