Out of all those times phone rings, how many times do you stop what you're doing to answer it?

I'll bet it's a lot. 90%? 95%? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing it's up there.

I know because I used to stop whatever I was doing to answer it. Didn't matter what I was doing, I would just stop - and answer phone.

Until one day something dawned on me:

I don't HAVE to answer it! It's not required. I can let it ring and let my answering machine get it. After all, that's what it's designed to do.

It used to annoy heck out of my wife when phone would ring - right next to me - and I would ignore it (inasmuch as you can ignore a ringing phone). She would rush for phone saying "Geez . . . aren't you gonna answer that?". And I'd ask "Why?"

And for a long time I wondered why people stop whatever they're doing and answer their phone.

The answer is simple - because we're conditioned to, that's why. Sure, you could argue - Because it could be important; What if it's my broker with a hot tip; What if it's an emergency.

The bottom line is, though, it's all conditioning. Just look around you on any given day in any given location. People can't even leave home without a telephone!

Conditioning.

I would love to be able to get my readers to just stop whatever they were doing when my newsletter hits their mailbox and read it from start to finish. Better still, to purchase products I recommend. Wouldn't that be great?

Well, we may never be able to achieve that level of conditioning, but there are some things you can do to help stop conditioned response of just deleting your emails before they're read.

OK, now imagine losing your entire e-zine subscriber list. Did that pang just get a bit more intense? (Ouch!)

"Master List Builder" Joel Christopher asked several Internet marketing gurus question, "If your office was burning down and you could save one thing, what would it be?"

The unanimous answer among all of them was, "my list "!

Your list is your goldmine. It's your pool of warm prospects and clients with whom you've taken months to build a level of credibility and trust. They're your ticket to a steady stream of income.

It can take years to build a large collection of opt-in subscribers. But they can disappear in a flash if they're not protected. So, are YOU backing up your list on a regular basis? (Be honest!) If not, let's get you started today.

<< If Your List Resides on Your Computer...

If you send out your e-zine or e-mail promotions from your own computer, you MUST make backing-up your list a daily habit. And by "backing-up," I mean saving your list to a disk or location other than your hard drive. For example, you can save your list to:

1) a Zip disk (you'll need a Zip drive) 2) a CD (you'll need a CD burner) 3) a floppy disk (these don't hold much data though) 4) an external hard drive (these are less expensive now than they used to be) 5) a secure, Web-based file storage service.