Here is an interesting idea: Once you learn to think like a marketer and you train your brain to look at things from this new perspective, what ends up happening is the tools almost become irrelevant. You can be in literally any situation and you can end up being the top dog in that environment.

That can mean all of a sudden you find yourself in Ghana, with no food and hopefully just a little bit of clothing, and you're completely down and out. You certainly don't have a computer. You definitely don't have access to direct mail, but once you learn how to think like a marketer, you can find out what everybody in the village wants.

You can find out a way to get it and you can find out a way to profit and excel at whatever it is you do, in whatever situation you are, whether you're speaking or whatever. You don't even need to be selling something. Thinking like a marketer is really about rallying people and finding out what large groups of people want to do, and then helping them get it really easily.

The first thing marketers need to do is to build their lists of contacts, people who want to work with them, people they want to work with, people who have bought from them, or people who may want to buy from them in the future. In the real world, this list is usually stored on a Rolodex, and hopefully, it's a big, fat, Rolodex.

Online marketing is just a wee bit different in that you can advertise and build a list.

You build a squeeze page, which requires the potential list member to at least fill in their first name and email address to get more information about whatever it is you're offering. Sometimes, marketers give things away to get people to sign up for their lists. Other times, the list-builders may be holding a teleseminar or launching some product. The issue is that you have to make people want to know more about whatever it is you're promoting so they'll give you their information.

In online marketing, the list is gold. In fact, it's more valuable than gold because you can buy that anywhere, right? But you can't buy a list.

You can buy leads. But that's not a very smart thing to do. First, if you email them, and they haven't given you permission to do so, that's spamming, and spamming is something you never want to do. It can ruin your reputation online and get you booted from your ISP. Any person that you contact with email marketing must have opted-in, meaning, they had to first, fill in the information on your squeeze page, and then verified that they wanted to be included on your list, usually via clicking a link in an email sent by an autoresponder.

Autoresponders are the tools by which you'll maintain and contact your list. They help you to create the form for your squeeze page, and after a person signs up to be on your list, they send the verification email and record everything about the transaction so that even if you are accused of spamming by someone, the autoresponder records can prove differently.

So, let's say you're having a teleseminar and you want to be sure there will be people on the call. Use your squeeze page to advertise it and collect names and email addresses of the people who are interested in attending. They won't all attend, for sure, but most of them will opt-in to your list. Drive traffic in every way you can to that page, and your list is growing.

Once you have a list, you can ask them what they want, and everything else clicks in. You're a marketer. You're learning what people want and you're solving problems. Next thing you know, you're successful because you took the time and effort to build your list.