optin-confusion

You could in theory try to do that, but it's a very bad idea, for several reasons:

1) It'd be hard, tedious and clumsy work.
2) Mass email sending of that type is prohibited by many providers of residential/home internet connections / ISPs.
3) Your email deliverability rates would probably stink.
4) Even if (2) and (3) didn't apply, you'd surely receive spam complaints at some point I think, and then you'd lose your service anyway, after you got your ISP's IP address blacklisted.

(EDIT: Forgot to mention ... not only is it prohibited by many ISPs, but it's also prohibited by many regular web hosts - just in case you were thinking about self-hosting a mailing list script).

So no - if you're serious about building a mailing list (and I suppose you must have a good reason to want to build one in the first place - and whatever that is should be reason enough to be serious about it), then you're going to have to utilise a specialised, professional service, like Aweber or GetResponse; there isn't really any two ways about it, I'm afraid.

For the record, I think GetResponse is is free up to 200 subscribers, and if you're sending 5 mailings or less per month. And to be honest, it's not that expensive after then.

MailChimp is also free up to 1000 subscribers (or so I read) I think now, but don't try to use them for any sort of affiliate marketing, as it's prohibited under their Terms of Service. Could be okay for promoting your own stuff, though? Depends what you're doing.

Good luck.

Having a decent auto-responder is very important with IM. Alot of people make alot of money from their lists due to auto-responders.

One thing you need to know about is the can spam act, Aweber and other mainstream mailing list providers take care of all the legal items for it. If you don't ad-hear to it you can get into a lot of trouble very quickly.

The level of tracking and functions/features is top of the line and a lot of people here would consider it a required investment for internet marketers.

You can do it yourself from your computer with desktop software, you can also get software to install on your web host and other than initial purchase costs you can send for free.

There are some free solutions out there if you're determined to make a go of it that way. One quick one is a Wordpress plugin called Mailpress.

I love free for almost everything on the web but for bulk email. I don't like the free choices because as has been mentioned, spam is serious business. You have to respond to any and all spam complaints and spam is such a dirty word you're guilty until proven innocent with your Isp. They'll cut off your mail capability in the blink of an eye and keep it off until you can prove you're not a bad guy.

Or you can use a web based service.

Three popular programs are Aweber, Getresponse & Constant Contact

Aweber is my choice. They've been around the longest and to my knowledge have the highest deliverability rate - 93%. Most everything is pretty straightforward with Aweber usage but they do have great video training plus their email support is terrific (haven't used phone support).

Prices for most all the services aren't too far apart.

Well I dont recommend doing it in the old way. If you are in a tight budget then use free resources, listwire for example. Its a free autoresponder you can use to cut the costs.

Andrea

We spend hundreds of dollars a month on an autoresponder but its worth every penny...I can make that back in the first hour of sending out one email. So while it might seem like an expense now, it will soon be an investment earning you a LOT back!!