Let me take this opportunity to reconstruct what I've experienced in my personal case study of how I built a list.
If someone is to tell you that they started with a million leads, don't take their word for it.
They're probably spamming.
Someone may have used an email harvesting software to acquire the email addresses without permission.
And list building is never about spamming.
Spamming is legal.
List building is about permission based marketing.
Someone visits your website, and decides (consciously) to leave their name and email addresses with you.
In most cases, you offer something free in exchange for their permission to contact them again at a later date via email.
That's list building.
To build a list properly from the ground up, the amateur will think that the bigger the list, the more money he'll make.
He'll soon be very disappointed with the results.
Always remember, the goal is to convert the subscribers on the list to paying customers.
What good will it do it all the list does is to sit there and buy nothing? The professionals understand this.
So they always test their lists while they're small before doing anything to scale up their business.
This is also one of the greatest advantages of having an Internet Business.
You can always test small and if the business works, scale it up very quickly.
I base my little case study upon this knowledge as well.
I built a small list of 236 members.
I then created a product, and priced it at $19.
90.
I sold eight copies of it.
Of course, before creating the product, I'd already done some research on the marketplace.
The fact that my product managed to sell simply proved that my research is accurate.
I then did more tests and tried to sell the product at various price points, and found that $47 is the best price point for that particular product.
To this day, the same product has continued to sell reasonably well without much additional effort.
So remember, always test small before scaling up big.