Building the list is with no doubt the most important milestone an online entrepreneur has to pass towards building a sound business.

The emergence of Internet made possible to build a list of subscribers with very low cost.

But it doesn’t mean that just building a list is enough to build a prosperous business.

This is a mistake many internet marketers are making. They think that if they gather a high number of email addresses they have an asset.

A long list of email addresses has no value if behind all these addresses are not the right people, interested about the content presented to them when subscribing.

It is like you open a luxury store in a very crowded, high traffic yet poor area. Lots of people will pass through the front of the store, but nobody eventually will enter and buy. The store will go bankrupt. Traffic in this case has no value.

But if you open the same store in an exclusive area, even if the traffic is not very high, your store will still make good sales because the people passing by are the perfect target for your store.

So it is with your list.

If you subscribe people on your list based on a clear message about what you intent to tell them later, they will join you knowing very well what are you talking about and they will be prepared to listen to you. That means they are interested in your topic and have an unfulfilled need or desire tied to your subject.

However, only gathering all these email contacts into your list won’t make your list really valuable yet. You should immediately leverage people's openness towards you and your message and continue to communicate with them and make them relate to you.

Encouraging them to write to you and answering their messages will get them closer to your business and will build trust in you and in what you are eventually offering as solution to their needs.

Showing these people that you care and that you listen to them, asking them what they are expecting from you and providing free valuable content before selling them anything, will transform your list in a valuable asset.

They will be ready to buy from you and you won’t even need to convince them to buy. Many sales objections they might have about your offer will be already being eliminated by the time you’ll be sending them your sales page.

If you are or if you intend to be in the internet marketing business and you want to have a successful business, you have to seriously think about what behind the email contacts in your list really is.