Have you signed up for your free stuff today? Or just wanted to buy something lately and had to put your first name and email in? Or just wanted to see what information is on a site and filled one out? I do not know how many lists I am on now, I lost count. It is good marketing practice to get as many subscribers as you can and have a big list, but is this getting out of hand?

As a marketer is feel that I must look at other sites and see what is out there. I dedicate a half hour a day and sometimes a little longer looking at my co-marketers sites and also like to look at the sites with top rankings on the search engines. I am finding a lot more sites are not letting me view them without opting in, you know, landing pages, or squeeze pages. I do understand the principle and the reasoning behind this, I am a marketer also.

The other side of this is I have dedicated a half hour of my day to read my email. I have 4 email addresses now. One personal that I check frequently, one for business, one for subscriptions that I like to read up on and am glad I joined and another for forced sign ups.

It has gotten to the point that I would need to dedicate my whole day to reading email if I read them all. I know about the unsubscribe link at the bottom. It just seems like a waist of my time to have to open each one and go to the bottom, press on the link and then to the next and so on. I opened my forced email today that had been unopened for 3 days and had over 350 emails I had to delete just to empty it.

My point is that I am looking at this differently now. Rather than a good practice, how many people are doing the same with my emails? People getting overwhelmed with email and even though they might want to read what I have to say or offer, they see hundreds of emails and just delete the whole box.

I admit that a lot of the fault is my own because I am a buyer. I love to keep up with the latest and see the products and test them and use them. I am a good consumer. Some people I buy from every time they come out with a new product. I also like reading the email copy and ad copy to get ideas and educate myself on copy.

It has been said that each one on your list is worth $1. I feel that I am a little more valuable to some, am less value to most others.

I am teetering on the top of the fence right now with the list building tactics and logic. I am seeing it as a necessity and also as being like a used car salesman. I think it could hurt a lot of good marketers with good information to offer. I don't believe that they will not survive because if you have good products and good services then you will get return business, and they also will have affiliates working for them. It is going to get very hard for the little start up marketers though.

The value of the list is going to be dropping like the value of the dollar and real estate. There is going to be too many people with large lists and not enough consumers. My thoughts are that marketers are going to have to be more focused on SEO, Adwords, articles, social sites, forums, banner ads and links to get people to their sites. The email response is going to become a minimal factor. I could be wrong, but that is my forecast after looking at my email box today and deleting it all without even glancing at but a few headlines.

I don't recommend anyone else doing this, but I am going to live like I always have, by the golden rule. I am not forcing anyone to join my subscription. If they like my freebies and like my content, and chose to receive information from me, then they can sign up.