For those who have been in Internet marketing for any amount of time, you have heard how important it is to have a mailing list to email. You can read it on nearly every Internet marketing site on the Internet “The Money Is In The List”. I have been in Internet marketing for more than 5 years and one question that always comes up is “I use safe-lists, should I be using my own list?”

Here we’ll cover this question and hopefully give you a better idea on how you should run your email marketing.

Safe-lists are the first thing we will discuss. A safe-list is a membership site made up of hundreds or even thousands of other Internet marketers. You can usually join without paying fees. Once you sign up you will be obtaining emails from other Internet marketers who are likewise a member of the site.

Most safe-lists these days are credit based lists so you need to click on the credit links in the emails sent to you. You then use these credits to send email to other people in the safe-list, and so on.

Remember that the other members of the safe-list are like you — they want to email people and obtain traffic but they don’t wish to purchase something that another member is telling them about. Even though you may make a sale here and there by using these lists, it is not enough to make it worth your while.

Still, safe-lists have a spot in Internet marketing. Now, if you want your own list, safe-lists can help you grow it. You can have people’s email addresses by giving stuff away and having people give you their name and email address in order to get the free item. This way you are developing your own mailing list which is much more powerful.

Which leads us to the question “Do I need my own list?” Yes you do, at least if you wish to be successful. If you ask anyone who has been in the IM scene for some time they will tell you that you can generate approximately $1 every month for each person you have on your own mailing list. So let’s say over the next year you work hard at growing your email list and you get 3,000 people to sign up, your email list is now worth $3,000 each month.

This is an average as everyone on your email list is not going to just buy a $1 product from you every month. The way it is works out is, when you have people on your mailing list they are more likely to buy from you as long as you give quality, and you should be able to sell 1 product once a month to every 1 person out of 50 who are on your mailing list.

To explain this much better, 1 person out of every 50 pays for a product worth $50 to you each month, that equals an average of $1 per person.

You can even mail a different offer to your mailing list every day. You can also build your list however big you want it to be, where safe-lists simply let you email so many people every 3 to 7 days. In addition, you are not limited on how you build your list, feel free to employ any technique you want.

You don’t have to merely employ safe-lists You can add an opt-in form on your blog so people can be updated, then you can email them also and your list grows. It doesn’t stop there however, you can employ any method or program you like that can help you build your mailing list. The point is it is limitless.

Hence, safe-list or your own email list, which one should you concentrate your time and effort on? Again, safe-lists are fantastic for helping you grow your own email list, but building your own email list has to be your priority.