Hello,

List or no list depends on what model of online business you are into. If you are into article marketing, you don't need list. But if you are affiliate marketer, list/leads of your own is essential for email marketing purpose, you can easily mail them your offers, interact with them, ask them to review your own product for you. Your own list save you the stress involved in developing a website around the product name keywords, fighting for place in search engines to get ranked and so on.

If your are interested in building list, you can easily start by giving out free reports, ebooks, software, PLR products etc. This means is one of the cheapest means of building list. Though how responsive the list might be in terms of converting them to sales is not guarantee, because everyone loves to download stuffs for free.

These free reports can be shared on forum like this, you can add the link of your freebies to your signature. I have given free stuff as "Special offer" on Warrior Forum in order to build list likewise you can use part of this forum called "JV Notify Pro Beta Brainstorming and Bargains" to do such.

I have a report that detailed what you can do to start building your list immediately. Here is the direct download: http://olusegunbalogun.com/Free-Report-Fortune.pdf

Hope this add value..

All the best,
Olusegun Balogun