I started to see the popups as ideas, marketing ideas, and things that sparked my imagination, but soon developed an awareness that there were a gold mine of concepts I could use but create in my own way.

I even used the picture concepts in the popups as a foundation for creating my sites look and feel. I became proficient in photoshop as a result. I’d take pictures trying to make them similar to the ads, cloning a CD ad to the inside of a television picture and so on. It wasn’t long before I realized that spam mail held the same value and potential.

About two years ago I read somewhere that success is not just a path, it’s a process and the process can be copied or rather honed into your own version of the process. People out there are already doing it and it is so transparent if you just open your eyes, down to the autoresponder and format they use.

Commercials copy one another all the time for this same reason, success begets success. I believe it was Robert Kyosaki (rich dad poor dad author) who brought this to my attention. I laughed when I read this, because it’s sooo true that while most of the world is getting annoyed by commercials, spam, popups/unders, and so on, I see it as an opportunity to probe my creative centers. I don’t always enjoy this spam, commercials and so on, but I do pay attention. I discovered when you turn the sound off on your television during a commercial, the annoying factor almost disappears and you can actually pay closer attention to the process used, (and lol the manipulation hidden by the loud marketing)…

Not every process will work for everyone, but you can always get something out of it to add to your own concepts…

Also VERY funny is (as dave described) that those guys selling courses telling them to buy their course to learn how to build lists are using the very content they teach you to do it, and it’s absolutely free to learn if you skip the course and just open your eyes to the process your going through to get their newsletter!

This blog site is proving very intriguing and insightful. Even things I already knew are being brought to the front burner and rethought out… kudos!

-J

Dave — Doing that for me was a KEY, when I started doing this years ago. The key is to use your e-mail client to do the heavy lifting.

What I have done is to set up an email folder called “miscellaneous newsletters” and under that a set of sub-folders for each of the different newsletters I subscribe to. Then I set up the filtering criteria so that each one lands in its own proper folder.

Then I can schedule a day every week (or every two weeks, whatever) to sit and review those items. In the meantime, they just accumulate while I concentrate on other things. This means that I can wait until I can give my full attention to them.

Without a filtering system, you have to spend precious time moving this stuff around, and before long it gets tedious, then you quit doing it altogether.

Another plus: if you own Adobe Acrobat and also use MS Outlook, you can click a button and instantly convert an entire folder of emails into PDF’s that can be shared, moved offline, printed out, etc.