List Building is the life blood of any business. Every person who clicks on your website is a potential customer so, you want to be able to capture their details so that you can promote further services or products to them at a later date. When you spend the hard earned 'spondooleys' drive traffic to your website you are increasing your lead generation. Having a good autoresponder service is key to improving the conversion rate of those leads. Personally I user Aweber, and it is a service that the majority of succesful online marketers use.
If you have a company website, more than likely it will have an aweber autoresponder list builder behind it. But this is a company website. If you should leave the company all the hard earned leads you have built up will be lost. They will end up with the company you left. Just think how much money you spent generating those leads for them to not really be under your control.
With Aweber you can create a newsletter and send that out to your email list when you like. You can create more than one type of email list, you can direct these from your blog, your website (s), or even to affiliate links.
You can also create capture forms (used for email sign ups), and more importantly you can also track who opened your emails or not.
If you are serious about making a full time income online, you need two things in my opionion
a) your own website
b) your own mailing list client
If you haven't already got a seperate mailing list client, then I suggest you look around for one now. Aweber is one of the more well known ones, but there is also icontact which has been getting some good reviews also.
