Most newcomers to Internet marketing underestimate the importance of automation to their home business. In fact many are not sure what automation is even though they are sure to have experienced it at work many times if they have been involved in any form on online business.

The first part of making your business automatic is an autoresponder. Basically an autoresponder does what it says: it responds automatically. How do you think that businesses can run 24/7 from anywhere in the world. The beauty of the internet is that there are no frontiers, and no matter what time it is in your home country, somewhere it is going to be any other time on the 24 hour clock. It sounds a bit strange put that way, but whatever the peak time is for internet activity, it will be that time somewhere in the world.

When it is 2 am in California it will be 10 am in Europe for example, and if you want to be successful online you should not restrict your market place. However, you cannot be expected to be awake all day, so some way has to be found to deal with the routine of your business while your are asleep. That is the job of website automation in general and an autoresponder in particular. There are many different types and sources of autoresponders and it is not the purpose here to recommend one above another, but to give you an idea of the range of jobs that they can be programmed to carry out. Let's look at a business from start to finish, and find out where an autoresponder can fit into it.

You start with advertising your service or product. There are many ways you can do this with a home business, and let's say you start by building an email list. To do that you design a squeeze page that is the landing page of an ezine advertisement. A squeeze page is designed to collect names and email addresses, and contains an opt-in form. Your prospect clicks on your advert and lands on your squeeze page. They decide to fill in the form, because you offer a free seven part course teaching them more about your niche.

One of the big problems with opt-in forms is that machines can fill them in – machines known as spambots – unless you stop them. One way is by use of a Turing or Captcha code, another by means of a confirmation link. Once the name and address have been filled in, your autoresponder adds the details to a database, and most autoresponders offer an unlimited number of databases so that you have one for each website or even each product. The autoresponder also gives the prospect an immediate online message that they have to confirm their subscription by clicking on a link in a confirmation email that the autoresponder has just sent to the respondent's email address.

So the prospect opens their email and clicks on the link. They are then sent a Thank You email and the first part of the course – all automatically. You will have previously programmed the autoresponder to send one part of the course every two days, until it is complete, and inside each part you will have included an advert for your product. It is said that a prospect needs seven or eight exposures to a product on average before deciding to purchase. Your autoresponder is doing that by providing your course over a period of 14 days.

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