You have heard it said a million times before. The only way to make money online is to build your list. This doesn't mean to build a list of people who have bought for you. It means to build a list of potential customers. The question is how do you do this? Actually the first question you should be asking is why do you do this?

The reason why is not always obvious to Internet marketers. They think that the purpose of putting up their sales page or web site is to make a sale. Well, yes and no. Of course you want to make a sale because ultimately that is how you make your money. But how you go about making that sale will help determine just how successful you're going to be.

The problem with trying to sell somebody directly is that they don't know you and have no reason to trust you. Here you are trying to persuade them to buy your product or sign up for your program. With all the mistrust on the Internet, this isn't very likely. But there is a way to make this process a lot easier if you just build your list instead of trying to sell something to these people.

So just how do you do that? Well, there are a number of ways. The best way is to offer somebody something for free, like a report. If you're putting together a resale rights package of a certain kind of lead generation system that you are trying to tell people will bring them visitors to their site, what you may want to do is create what is called a lead capture page to send them to instead of to your sales page. Tell them that they can have a free report sent directly to their email box that will explain to them why most forms of Internet advertising are ineffective and why YOUR system is so good. In the report itself you can explain the various forms of advertising such as safelists, FFA posting, classified ads, etc. Point out the problems with each. Make sure you do your research on this so the info you give is indeed factual. Don't give your opinion. Back everything up with facts.

You might want to make the series itself a number of emails. The more, the better. You want to give these people as much info as you can. This way, over time, you will get them to trust you. Once they have done that they are more likely to purchase from you than if you simply sent them to a sales page.

Doing this is not a difficult process at all. What you do is create the email series, subscribe to an auto responder service, and load this series into your auto responder. The next thing you do is create a lead capture page which makes the person know about your free report. Some auto responder companies actually have templates already built in to do this where you just plug in the title of your page and they take care of the rest. When a person is directed to this page they will have to fill out a form to opt in. The company will then send them a confirmation email which they have to answer. After they do this they will begin getting the series delivered to them.

This is just one of many ways to build your list. Another thing you could do is actually present them with a one time offer on your page where they can maybe download a free book or piece of software to use. Once they have done this, which you will handle by requiring them to again fill out a form to get the download, you will then have them as part of your list. You can then from time to time send them offers. If they liked what they downloaded for free, there is a good chance that they will buy the products that you are presenting to them. Again, it all comes down to trust.

Just use a little imagination and you should have no trouble coming up with ways to build your own in house list.