Now don't get me wrong, I do believe that you should have a list, in fact I was list building before I even heard of internet marketing. I built a list of around 5500 in 1985 for my off line ironmongery business and instead of the internet I used snail mail, but that said I have to ask you to take a look at the facts.

1.If you are remotely interested in internet marketing you have signed up for dozens if not hundreds of free giveaways, special reports, Courses,Traffic Exchanges, E-zines, and membership sites. The number of lists you are subscribed to is truly staggering.

2.You do not respond to more than a tiny percentage of the advertising that you receive from those lists

3.Even when you are interested in a particular offer enough to read it you will actually spend your cash very rarely.

So what does that mean? Well if you have a list of 10,000 to use a round figure, you send out an email offer and you get a respectable open rate of 5% that is 500 people who have taken the trouble to read your message. If as many as 5% of them decide to buy your product that is 25 people paying you.

So if your list is worth $1 a month for each subscriber they are producing $400 profit each, even if you sent an offer each day of the month and got the same figures every day that would be 750 purchasers for the month, or a profit of $13.33 on each sale, I suppose that the second figure is within the bounds of possibility, but is it possible to make $1 a month for each name on your list, I don't think so!

I believe that the claim is not actually based on results, but on the glib offering of a copy writer, and because it is easy to remember, it has been used so many times that it has become an urban myth. I regularly send messages to my lists, and the results that I get from my tracking program show that depending on how good my headlines are I can achieve between 4% and 8% open rate, but the conversion rate is usually about 2 to 3 percent and if I use those numbers the figures work out to 24 purchasers per 10,000.

So build your list, but don't be disheartened when you cant achieve $1 a month for each name, you aren't doing anything incorectly, you have just been mislead by another piece of advertising hype.