There are a very few fundamentals to internet marketing and list building is one of them. Why? Because unlike the real world, your presence on the web is completely invisible to potential customers unless you go and stand in their way and make them fall over you. In internet jargon that's called 'driving traffic'.

In reality, it's more like finding a herd of stampeding cattle and making sure you go stand in front of them.

So once you've got someone's attention you sure don't want them to disappear again like someone walked into your high street store, took a look around and walked out again without buying anything. At least they walked in so there must have been something about your shop/products/staff or even the pattern on your carpet that attracted their attention. So you want to make sure that you can communicate with them again just in case you can work out what it was that they liked and offer them some more of the same – up to the point that they might buy something from you.

You can't do any of that if you do not know who they are. So your number one priority the first time they wander into your store is to get their name and email address and their permission to communicate with them again. That's called list building.

I recognised a little while ago that you can work your socks off as I have done for some time learning individual skills and applying them to various projects with varying degrees of success. But without an automated system you are working very hard for little progress. What you really need is automation which is exactly what the internet is good at.  If you are into online marketing and are not using the one unique characteristic of the internet then you have to ask yourself if you are barking up the wrong tree.

That's why I shall shortly be launching my automated list builder called www.ListLegions.com that embodies all the fundamental aspects of marketing whether online or offline.

Giving value to your prospects before you ever offer them something to buy, gathering their details to add to your list, using viral marketing concepts to persuade your subscribers to pass your message on to their friends, offering all the services of your own system to them so they can benefit too and automating as much as possible of these marketing basics so that subscribers can concentrate their time on marketing and not on the mechanics.

It's an abiding principle of marketing that you have to give in order to receive – and I am planning that ListLegions.com is going to do just that by making list building as easy as possible for my subscribers.

Bruce Bird