You have a great line of products or services you are selling through your home internet business. You have found the perfect inexpensive web host and you have a great website running. You have even designed a few great Email-marketing messages and the first issue of a newsletter to send out. The question now is to whom will you send it? How do you get a long list of interested customers to sign up for your email messages?

In some ways, the pressure is off and you do not need to make a hard sell pitch to an unwilling customer on the fly. If someone is getting newsletters and messages from your e-mail marketing campaigns, it is because he or she has voluntarily provided you with an e-mail address. That does not mean they are going to read–much less, click through–every message that they get, but at least you have passed the first hurdle: they are expecting to hear from you.

After that, it is largely a numbers game. Statistically, a certain percentage of people who get your e-mail marketing messages are going to open them and actually look at them. A smaller percentage are going to follow through by clicking on your links and doing business with you. How you make this work is by sending your messages to as many interested people as possible so that the small percentage who sign-up and do business with you represents a significant Number of people.

This can be a bit of a puzzle. You cannot just send your messages to anyone and everyone or you will get into trouble for spamming. Therefore, you are limited to sending to the people who opted-in by giving you their e-mail addresses, but this number needs to be huge. The problem before you is how to get massive numbers of people to enter their e-mail addresses into the sign-up box on your website.

As with everything else involved in establishing your Internet business start-up, you want the growth of your e-mail database to take as little time and effort on your part as possible.

One technique is to let your customers do the work. Make sure to embed a link to your sign-up box in all of your e-mail messages and newsletters. That way, when someone forwards your e-mail to a friend, client, or associate, those people can easily sign up with you as well.

If you have a little capital, and you feel like kick starting your list, you can buy client lists from a data merchant. You would want to make sure that you are dealing with a reputable merchant who is selling you addresses of people who have honestly chosen that a merchant like you can contact them. You have probably seen these sign-up boxes yourself on others’ pages: there is usually a box to check to receive “great offers from our partners” –or similar language.

Finally, the third method I would suggest for beginners is to get involved in an affiliate-marketing program. An affiliate-marketing program will direct consumers shopping at your affiliates’ sites to your site as well, giving them the opportunity to sign up with you and give you their email address.

These are just for starters. There are seemingly infinite ideas for increasing the number of clients on your mailing lists; the challenge for you is to find the ones that work for you. Just keep “low maintenance”—that is, easy to do, without much time or effort required on your part—as your guiding star.