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 sized contact list?

An easy (but usually expensive) solution is to rent or buy a list, but there’s usually no guarantee that the list is up-to-date, hasn’t been rejected for 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 really free, works well, and isn’t a bunch of crap…

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

Now the way most people achieved 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 was that unless you were very lucky, you would immediately be out of pocket, and unless you hit it big, you might never get that investment back. My costs for email marketing, database management, autoresponders, and the like, must have initially cost me hundreds of dollars each year.

Many people, including myself, spent an inordinate amount of money on so-called ‘guru’ seminars, traveled the world to global Internet summits, or paid thousands of dollars for ‘guaranteed’ affiliate marketing packages, bulk email marketing products or products.

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

So how does this prove how good a freeware package really is and if you would be wasting your time if you opt for the wrong ones? Well, there are a lot of 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 thing comes.
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 up, making sure no credit card number is mentioned.
6. See if you can identify who wrote the packet; it could be a well-known internet marketing ‘guru’, a genuine one like Gary Ambrose, for example.
7. Take a few days to explore the software and test its features.
8. After a few days, you will probably start receiving a series of emails from the author. They will probably be no-strings offers, but each offer will give you a chance 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 realizing it, 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 indicates…