What Would Be Considered a Descent E-mail List?

1, if you treat that person right.

The more subscribers, the higher your chance gets.

The better you treat each of those subscribes, the better your chance gets.

I think a good number to shoot for is 500 if buyers and 5000 if "freebies"...

But like Will said - you only need "one" in theory.

Cheers,
Coby

Your goal should be to build a high quality relationship with your subscribers because doing so will allow you to make more money from your list

Yeah, 500+ would be a nice start. But I think the mistake a lot of people make is they wait until they have a few hundred subscribers before they start building that relationship with the list. Make sure you start following up with your subscribers right away -- even when your list is very small. Each subscriber is just as important as the other and that relationship needs to be built right from the start. It's not just something you can wait and do later when the list is bigger.

I think the focus should be one at a time. If you can get one to open your email and click a link, you're making progress. Sometimes we get too caught up in the numbers rather than the relationship with those numbers. What's the point of having 5k, 10k, or even 50k if they don't want to hear from you.

So the question I would be asking is how many people can I can to open my emails with the content or information that I send to them that can help THEM get what they want? When that's done, the conversions are a non-issue because they can't wait to hear from you. Now mind you is not a one way street. You ultimately would like to get compensated for your efforts because you are not in the charity business. But in time, that will come.

I agree with most of what's being said about building the relationship even with a small list and that it's not as much the size as it is the value you give.

In my own experience I didn't start being able to rely on my list for an actual decent amount of income until it got to over 1000 subscribers. Before that I always had to supplement my list marketing efforts with internet marketing or website design services. Though that could have had just to do with my inexperience in knowing what and how to make offers as it did to the size of my list. It does take time to also learn what your list responds to so you'll need to consider giving yourself that time along with how big the list is.

It made the follow-up and providing value to my list difficult when I was focusing on client work AND list building. But persistance, determination and production of value pays off in list building and now I'm *almost* to the point where I need not take any client work at all and that's a great feeling (I haven't had a client project since November at this point and still doing good.).

List building can seem pretty complicated but if you start with one and build from there and stay consistent it gets better.

This is one part of my business I'm focusing on growing and getting better.

Manny