From my experience in various internet businesses, this is absolutely the case. If you don't have a correct targeted list to promote your products and services to then your business will never get off the ground. You will be forever wasting your money on fruitless advertising that will not work.

The question then arises: How do I create a list of targeted people who will BUY my products or services? Note, we are in business here, the aim is to get people on your list that are proven buyers of products or services that are similar to the ones you are providing.

Many new comers to internet businesses try and email as many people as they can, a sort of scatter gun approach, hoping that some of the recipients of their emails will buy their products. In my experience this just does not work.

Even though you may be using opt-in lists bought from the numerous lead companies out there today, it very seldom works.

The best list is one that YOU create yourself, using your own products or services. In this way you know you have a quality list of people who have directly enquired about your products.

One method many internet businesses use to get a list of people interested in their products is to give free products or ebooks away to entice people to sign up at their website.

This can be very effective in getting a lot of people to sign up at your website . However, you need to ask yourself, is this list really comprised of people who will BUY my products? In my experience, giving things away for free results in a large list of people who want something for free.

Makes sense doesn't it. I've used this method before and in my experience it is far inferior to the method I'm going to concentrate on below:

What you really need in your opt-in list to grow your business is a list of people that have bought something from you - it really doesn't matter for what amount, it could be $2. The main difference here is that they have gone to the trouble to take out their credit card and actually BUY something from you.

This action of purchasing a product from you makes them worth their weight in gold.

You see it is far better to have a list of 500 people who have bought from you, then have a list of 5,000 or even 50,000 who have never bought from you.

Your objective here is to get your prospect to buy a product, it doesn't matter what, the cheaper the better in my experience. Then you can up sell higher ticket items because you have established trust with your prospect and now they are your customer.

This action of up selling is where you make your money - don't forget it is going to cost you money to build that list, it won't come easy and it may take a while, but it is definitely worth it!

So let's have a look a how you can build that all elusive opt-in list of buyers:

Collection of data:

The most obvious place to start is usually with a lead capture or splash page. This is where you encourage your prospect or visitor to your site to buy the, preferably, cheap product you have for sale, let's say just $2. You should be able to send your product electronically as charging $2 you don't want to be mailing it.

There are many examples of lead capture or splash page you can see on the internet - they all have sales copy and inducements. My advice would be to pick the features of the best ones and preferably get a sales copy professional to do the wording for you.

Similarly there are many products available for you to choose. If you want a completely original product then my advice would be to write your own ebook! This is not as hard as it sounds, there are a huge number of resources on the internet that can help you.

Now, what information are you going to collect? The longer the form the less likely your prospect will fill it in and press the submit button. Recent surveys suggest asking for only the first name and the principal email address. The reason for asking for the prospects principal email address is that many people use services like hotmail, aol, yahoo for secondary emails and quite often they only look at these emails periodically.

You MUST get your prospect to read your emails that's why you should ask for their primary email address.

Next question, now you have captured the name and email address, where are you going to save it and how are you going to use the information?

Autoresponders are perfect for this and Aweber is the autoresponder most internet marketers use.

The autoresponder will automatically save the information from your capture form on your website and then automatically send out pre-defined emails on a timescale defined by you. This saves you an absolute fortune in time. It will follow-up your prospects and as we all know the money and conversion from your list comes from following up properly with your list.

I don't intend to talk about follow up emails as that is a subject for a whole book, but if you are serious in converting your list into sales then it is an absolute must you get this right.

Other sources than a website:

Classified Ads in newspapers Brochures Leaflets or postcards Radio or TV

These are known as offline advertising sources. Don't discount these, they can be very useful sources of driving traffic to your website.

The key is getting targeted traffic to your site that wants and needs your products. It's really that simple, however it's not easy to do. Again, getting targeted visitors to your site is a whole different ball game.

What I would say is that it takes time effort to succeed at any business and internet businesses are no different. You will need persistence and commitment to succeed and a never say die attitude.