The List - I Hate it for These 3 Reasons

Written by Dave Earley on Apr 16, 2009 12:21 pm

Email Marketing, in my opinion, was created to help keep business, customer and potential customer in touch with one another, as well as up to date on the latest news and information regarding that business.

As far as I have seen, this is not at all what is happening in the world of internet marketing today.

I have never been a list person. I did try it at one time, I have been a part of many other lists, and I must say that I loathe the list. Here are 3 great reasons why I hate the list:

Email Marketing clogs up my inbox.

It's true. Just sign up for a few different newsletters and you constantly get mail everyday from all sorts of online marketers. Email has become more of a hassle because of this. On top of that, half of the titles for these emails are really lame, and they just get deleted as fast as spam.

Everyday there's something new that I should buy.

The only reason people sign up for these lists is because they are getting something for free after signing up. After that, it seems like almost every email contains plenty of links regarding some product that you need to take advantage of now. As soon as I get a few of these in a row, I'm off of that particular list. Come to think of it, I've been on a lot of lists, and am unsubscribed from almost all of them now.

The person on the other end of the list is real good friends with the creator of the product I need to buy, at a special price.

I realize that this is marketing, that's why it's called email marketing, but this is just plain bull. "I'm real good friends with the person who created this, and you need to get it now while he is holding the special price!" What's worse, some of the products I did actually look at, and I noticed that I had already reviewed them myself and found them to be not that good, or at least not worth my money. In fact, I probably don't need almost anything that anyone is marketing.

A bought a couple of things(never from a list), when I first started out, and came to the realization that online marketers are mostly just marketing to other online marketers. Inevitably, this will mean that some will be successful and some will not, or many will not, just as the stats show.

List building, email marketing, whatever you wanna call it. I think it's totally lame for obvious reasons. I have no intention of creating my own list any time soon, but if I did, it would be a way for me to connect with people who want to know about me and my site and what I am doing. However, these things can simply be accomplished with forums and social media sites, which I like much more.

Dave Earley