Do You Have A 'Hidden' Mailing List?copyright 2002 John Evans

Strange as it may seem, I'll bet there are many of you
out there who have mailing lists on your computer, or
in your email program, and you're not aware of them.

We have been marketing on the internet for a while, and
have never thought too much about marketing with email.
Why? Well, for one thing there's so much talk about
"spamming" that I just didn't want to get involved
in it. Who needs that kind of hassle?

But, every once in a while I like to go through my
computer and clean out old files. And it just happened
that I started looking through my email program (Eudora)
and came across quite a few (for me) names. Now, these
names came from (1.) people who had joined one of my
free ad-page programs, or (2.) those who had clicked
on one of my autoresponders, asking for more
information.

As a result, I came up with a little over 200 names.
Not a whole lot when compared to some web masters,
or ezine publishers, but it was a good start for me.
And, these were people who had contacted ME at
some point in time.

Since I just became involved in a really great program,
it occured to me that I might as well give this email
marketing a try, and contact these people. I carefully
constructed an appropriate sales letter, and made sure
there was a clickable "Remove" link at the bottom of it.
In fact, I actually wrote 2 sales letters. Since AOL's
email program doesn't support "normal" links, on one of
the letters reserved for AOL members, I put the "Remove"
link in HTML. This way, they too can just click on it,
and not have to copy and paste the mailto: address.

The results are not all in, and may take some time, but
the point is that I had "found" a mailing list on my
computer, and wasn't even aware of it. Why not? Well,
all these names came in over a period of time. And,
since they just sort of trickled in, I was not much
aware that I was even building a mailing list.

So, why not look through YOUR computer, and see what
names you may have available? It's often been said that
the very best mailing list is YOUR OWN! How many people
have contacted you about a program you're in? Did you
save their names? You just might be surprised at what
you can find.