What do you think a newb should start out with?

Nor did I (I started out doing AdSense and Amazon-monetised niche sites, with SEO for traffic) and I would agree that it's not always necessary to earn a decent, consistent income.

However, it's not until you start building a list that you realise just how much money you were leaving on the table, and how inefficient your business was.

Harnessing prospects' email addresses, and allowing yourself the ability to contact them over and over again, reduces your reliance on generating and receiving such a huge and constant turnover fresh, new traffic; it leaves you a little less immediately reliant on the continued availability of your traffic sources, too - whether that be traffic from search-engine rankings, sig-file referrals from a forum on which you're a member, banner advertisements, or PPC campaigns and so on.

It's an asset, and it grants your business greater autonomy; it leaves it a little more impervious to the hiccups and uncertainties of outside forces over which you have very little (if any) control.

The more you think about it, the more you realise - no matter what you're promoting/selling or what your business is - that it nearly always makes sense to capture your visitors' email addresses. It just helps toward maximising the efficiency of your business. Why let anyone get away when they needn't have to, and why restrict yourself to only cashing in on the relative minority of people who are prepared to take immediate action toward buying a product/service, when you might only have needed to have made subsequent contact a handful of times for them to open their wallets?

Heck... I don't really care if it takes 365+ days and as many emails (through an autoresponder series I've gradually built up, for example) before someone buys: once they do, it's a sale I almost certainly wouldn't otherwise have made!

I can't think of many cases in which there'd be disadvantages in regard to putting up an opt-in and engaging in list-building; I can think of many cases in which having a list could confer significant advantages - both short-term and long-term - in relation to your bottom-line. So long as it's mostly all upside and no downside, why would you dismiss or avoid it?

once i find it i will click the "thank" button. That is the clearest and most to the point answer i have ever received. as soon as i get more savvy with building websites than i am now, i will launch something like that, appreciate the answer.

Not all niches monetize equally well. And it's painfully obvious that most newbies are obsessed with monetization first when it should come last, while they're desparately trying to avoid doing everything that comes before the sales funnel when all that "stuff" is precisely what determines how much, how well, how fast they could be monetizing. If they could simply stop doing what they're doing now - which isn't exactly setting the IM world on fire now is it? - and think things through from the potential customer's point of view - WIIFM - each step along the way could be so much easier to nail.

You can't make sound decisions without knowing all the options available.

Knocking your out doing the wrong things or doing them in the wrong way or the wrong order isn't going to get you ranking or build your list or make any sales. Why is that so hard to grasp?

Can someone say more about what the 30 day challenge is?

Mike, 30 days is probably the bare minimum a newbie should spend on any IM method to even halfway grasp things. From talking to my clients and students, it seems like the majority have issues even being able to stick to one thing for this short length of time!

Paul

If what one writes is very to extremely interesting, they'll not only read it but actively seek it out. And if it's written by "you," meaning entirely unique, G will suck it up like a vacuum cleaner and happily serve it up to those looking for it.