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Copyright 2005 Peter Dobler

If you are active on the web promoting your products, affiliate programs or services, you probably sense where I'm going with the title of my article. We all put a lot of effort into our internet business. We all have the same hopes and dreams about where our internet business will go. Unfortunately we are all depended on too many variables that have to be just right at the right time.

What is he talking about you might ask. Let's take a simple example. Listening to self declared gurus of internet marketing they all tell you the same thing. 'You have to build your list', by that they mean your email list.

After following this advice and spending hundreds of dollars in opt-in email leads and maintaining a list of over 5000 subscribers I was pretty convinced that success is just around the corner.

This is as far away from the truth as human possible. I'm running a newsletter delivered daily and I send additional sales letters to pitch some of my affiliate products. I track every email with ad tracking and click through analysis.

Guess what? Nothing! Sending daily emails and sometimes an additional sales letter would trigger something, at least a wave of cancellations, don't you agree? Well, my conclusion of this mess is that over 90% of the emails never passed the SPAM filters.

This is devastating. As you know most people sing up for newsletters through their free email accounts. The few who use their regular email address unsubscribe within a few days.

Don't get me wrong, newsletters are great and if done right they can help you to promote your business. I believe the key is that your newsletter needs to be unique and very narrow focused on a niche target.

Going back to the email leads issue. Buying email leads from email harvesters it is a waste of money. Even if they are double or triple opt-in leads. Promoting a copied newsletter is a waste of money. Why bother to promote something that is already promoted hundreds of times?

If you are targeting the people who are looking to make money online, your target audience is pretty narrow and they probably have already subscriptions to one or another form of marketing newsletter.

I'm actually shifting my focus completely and put a newsletter together to help people to get started with real estate investments, especially Florida real estate. As you can see this is a very narrow target audience. If I get a couple of hundred subscribers I will be happy. If you're interested send an email to mailto:suncoastrenttoown@getresponse.com I will let you know when the newsletter will be available.

The bottom line of my story is, don't advertise to the advertiser. You just waste your time and money. That's the main reason why people getting frustrated with their internet business and simply quit. This is like car dealers advertise solely to other car dealers. What do you think will happen?

I know what you are thinking. What happened to him? Didn't he tell us in his article "Where's the Traffic?" that email lists are the cure to non-visited websites? Yes, that's true. I still believe that autoresponders are good business practice to communicate with your customers. I just didn't see the value of buying email leads. Yes, I changed my opinion, which is plain human nature and happens to all of us.

I hope this made you think a little bit and if you can turn your business into the profitable margins based on my little advice please let me know. I'm eager to hear if somebody actually is listening to what I have to say.