One of the biggest sources of income these days would seem to be marketing a product, service, or affiliate products using email marketing. But how do you go about doing this if you don’t have a decent size contact list?

An easy (but usually expensive) solution is to rent or buy a listing, but there’s usually no guarantee that the listing is up-to-date, hasn’t been rejected by any responses, or is vaguely interested in your offer.

Based on my experience over the last 10 years, let me explain how I manage to spot software that is actually free, works well, and isn’t a bunch of crap…

There is only one real way to successful internet and email marketing, and that is to build your own list of qualified contacts, and that means you will need to purchase software to manage and sort your list, a facility to send out bulk emails and a method of setting up your automatic email follow-up list: an autoresponder.

Now, the way most people accomplished this is by taking a few years to build their expertise, and usually using software packages that had to be rented, month after month. What this meant is that unless you were very lucky, you would immediately be out of pocket, and unless you went big, you may never recoup that investment. My costs for email marketing, database management, autoresponders, and the like, must have initially cost me hundreds of dollars each year.

Lots of people, including me, have spent an inordinate amount of money on so-called ‘gurus’ seminars, traveled the world to global internet summits, or paid thousands of dollars for ‘guaranteed’ affiliate marketing packages, software development kits, and more. products or bulk email marketing products.

It’s funny, but when you go into this market, and ask around among your peers, you find out that the really successful internet marketers are the ones who sold you those seminar seats, or ‘pro marketing tools’.

So how does this prove how good a free software package really is, and whether you’d be wasting your time by going with the wrong ones? Well, there are many so called free packages out there, which happen to be:-

1. Just a trial copy, or a stripped-down version, just to get you hooked, and then the bill for the real version arrives.
2. Just a cheap method for the author to help build their list, not yours.
3. No, the best way to check a freeware package is this:-
4. Check out the features with a known good quality paid package,
5. Sign in, making sure a credit card number is not mentioned.
6. See if you can identify who wrote the package; it could be a well-known internet marketing ‘guru’, a genuine one like Gary Ambrose, for example.
7. Please spend a few days examining the software and testing its features.
8. After a few days, you will probably start receiving a series of emails from the author. These will probably be no-obligation offers, but each offer will give you the opportunity to even start building a list for yourself and even start generating some income for yourself pretty quickly.
9. You will probably find that these offers will come regularly, increasing your experience and your income.

This is what free software should be about: where the Guru really starts to guide you, without you really noticing, and without having to pay exorbitant sums for training courses, or buy this or that package.

In other words, the Guru is acting as his name suggests…