List building is one of the most important things you can do for your business. All of your outside marketing efforts should be aimed toward building your list of current and potential customers. This list is a gold mine of potential income, but only if you continue to feed it and use it properly to grow your business.

The first thing you have to do is start your list. It\'s best to start with your customers. You should already be keeping track of your customers\' contact information and recent purchases. If you are not, start now. This is vitally important to offering your current customers reasons to keep coming back for more.

The next thing you have to do is start building a list of potential customers, preferably one that can easily be integrated with your current list. The best way to do that is by using an autoresponder combined with a lead capture or squeeze page. A lead capture page is a web page that stands alone for the sole purpose of collecting information from site visitors. A squeeze page is similar, but instead of standing alone acts as a type of gateway for your regular site. In other words, people put in their information to be squeezed through to your main website.

Before you can reap the benefits of building a list in this fashion, you have to offer people a reason to join your list. Current customers will likely require much less motivation than potential buyers. You will need to offer something in the way of a free sample, a free downloadable informational product such as an e-book, free shipping on their order, or a special discount for being a member of your list.

Once you have your incentives planned and ready and you have your websites and autoresponders set up, you have to drive people to your websites to sign up for your list. You can easily do this with current customers by sending an email or letter explaining the advantages of being a member of your list, and providing them with the website link.

To bring new customers, however, you will need to drive targeted traffic to your site. The best way to do this is through article marketing. You can write articles that provide interesting and informative content and submit them to article directories. In the author resource box, or author bio, you can include a link to your website and provide the incentive for them to go there and sign up for your list.

These activities cannot be successful if you only perform them once or for a short period of time. List building is an ongoing process that should be never ending. It will continue to grow your business exponentially, and you will be glad for the additional benefits that email marketing and article marketing bring to your business growth.

List building can be used to grow your business in many ways. Once you get your list going you can promote an e-course in which you promote your products while providing useful information on your topic. Alternatively you can use email marketing to announce special promotions or in-store sales not available on the web. How you use your list is entirely up to you and will depend on the type of business and industry you are in.