When all you want to do is earn a little extra cash in a work at home business opportunity, the last thing you want to hear is that extra work is involved. After all, how can you have fun working on your personal home computer in your spare time if it means putting in the same (or more) effort than you put into your regular “day job”? All you really want to do is simply earn a few extra bucks — you don’t really want to get involved with building the relationships that come with building a list. And you definitely don’t want to burden yourself financially with a monthly $20 – $50 sibscription to an autoresponder or professional marketing system.

Online marketing is a relatively simple business that’s easy to get into. In fact it’s such an important business model that schools like Columbia Southern University, Capella University, Strayer University, and others offer degree programs in it. But you don’t need a college degree to be successful at selling things online. In fact, anyone can start inexpensively — or even free — as an affiliate marketer and become a financial success. All you need to do is follow a few simple principles, one of which involves the purposeful building of at least one list of people willing to receive email messages from you.

Building a list is hard work. At least that’s my conclusion. If list building were not so difficult more people would be doing it, right?

The act of building an opt-in email list has a reputation for being a “questionable practice”. After all, no one likes the idea of being put into somebody else’s database. Newbies enter the online sales and marketing arena every day with the lofty notion that it’s more virtuous to rise above the usual sales tactics that exploit others. With an attitude like that, those online marketing amateurs can make better use of their time doing volunteer work at the local soup kitchen.

Being an online marketer involves selling products, promoting programs, and informing others about useful services. Even when a product or service is “given away” as information in a free ebook or video the implication is that somewhere along the line someone will make a profit.

But you’ve got to engage an audience first. Once you’ve done that you can offer that audience both free items and things they have to pay for. You’ve got to start, however, with a list.

By building a list you’re primarily creating a set of people who…

• Agree with what you have to say
• Need or want your advice
• Will probably agree with you enough to eventually buy something useful based on your recommendation

Over the next few days I’ll go into how the task of building a list of opt-in subscribers can be simplified.  You’ll even learn how to make money at it before you turn a profit in your primary business.

Just as there is a right way and a wrong way to purchase traffic, there is also a right way and a wrong way to get leads. The wrong way is to use software that harvests email addresses. Usually when you buy traffic from a service sells lists of

So just what is email harvesting software? Well, let’s take the typical business website, for example. Business websites want you to trust them, and will usually place contact information – including one or more email addresses – on the company “Contact Us” page.

An email harvesting program crawls the Internet looking for email addresses on web pages. When it gets to the company website’s “Contact Us” page it grabs any string of text that looks like an email address and puts that text into a database. Later, the person who used the email harvesting software can section off the list of addresses and sell thousands at a time to people who think they’re buying legitimate leads.

In actuality, all anyone ever buys from these email harvesting companies is an invitation to be branded as a spammer. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) will close your account once you start sending out messages in bulk to a list of people who never asked for your information. After all, they didn’t agree to receive information from you in the first place. They’ve never even heard of you – or the company that harvested their email address.

There is, however, a legitimate way to build a list of leads quickly, easily, and a lot cheaper than dealing with list harvesting companies. People have been using this method for years to build lists. In fact, this is still the single best way to find people who want to make money working from home.

This simple but powerful method involves blasting a short advertisment (usually in text format) to billions of classified ad sites and search engine directories. And since it’s all done online through website advertising portals, you never get in trouble with your ISP for sending unsolicited email messages.

One of the best portals for blasting your ads to the Universe (literally!) is Leadsomatic. It costs nothing to blast your ad to over 2 billion sites. But for a small monthly fee you can generate thousands of leads every thirty days while enjoying a residual income when you recommend Leadsomatic to other advertisers. After all, everybody needs easy access to lots of interested leads.

Homework Assignment: Create a few short ads to promote the gift you created on Day 3. Create a simple email follow up series that showcases similar affiliate products and services and load these messages into your autoresponder. Use Leadsomatic to blast your ads once a day. In about 30 days you should have all the leads you can handle.