One of the best ways to make money online is with email marketing. With this business model you send out emails to your list. You can use these mailings to offer valuable content to your subscribers, and at the same time promote affiliate offers or gather traffic for your sites.

Email marketing can almost be considered the ideal business model: its inexpensive, easy, and you can quickly earn money. If you have a large and target list, it can also be very profitable.

John Reese, one of the most successful email marketers, is know to have called his email list his personal ATM. The reason being that whenever he wants money, he just sends out a mailing to his list.

• Email marketing is easy - The actual process of sending out a mailing is very easy. The hardest part is developing a qualified list. Once you have the software or subscribe to a service, all you have to do is paste the html code of the offer, or write and email, and press send. If you are just cutting and pasting the html of the offer, you can send out an email to thousands of people in a matter of minutes.
  
• Email marketing is inexpensive - Compared with other promotional options, email marketing is very inexpensive. If you use Atomic Mail Sender to send emails, than the cost of sending out each email can be zero. Even if you are using a premium service like Aweber or GetResponse, the cost of sending out each email is still less then 1 cent!
• Email marketing is profitable - If you have an email list of say 20k emails, and you send out an email promoting an offer that pays $2.50 per lead, even if you get a conversion rate of only 5%, than you will still make $2500 for a few minutes of work.
  

If you want to go the route of email marketing, you basically have two options:

• Paid autoresponder services - Aweber and GetResponse are two examples of paid services. I personally use Aweber, and they have double opt-in one the emails you collect. Basically this means that a person must confirm the email address twice to be subscribed. There is a cost associated with using a paid service, but they insure higher delivery and open rates. Usually with these services, as your list grows, the cost per email goes down.
• Buy a script - This is another option for sending out emails. In this case you usually only have the initial cost of the script, and the cost of sending out emails can be zero. Atomic Mail Sender is an example of such a script. Normally this type of email is more associated with spam.
  

When possible, I recommend you chose one of the paid services (I personally use Aweber). The small cost associated with sending out each email is far out weighted by the higher open and delivery rates.

Unfortunately, you cann´t always use one of the paid services because of the double opt-in option. For example, if you have a classified website or a forum, the email address of your users do not qualify for the paid services. In this case you can purchase a script like Atomic Email Sender to do the job.

I personally use both options, but you should follow the route that better suits your needs.