With all the blogs and social media sites, you may be confused about whether building a list still matters. Or you may think list building no longer works, because your list is simply not making money.

If you’re wondering about these questions, you may want to know what a veteran marketer says. Jimmy D. Brown, who practically invented email marketing and list building, says a lot of people don’t succeed on the Internet because they fail to build a list or they do it all wrong.

Why build a list?

Keep in mind that people who visit your website or blog the first time are rarely prepared to make a purchase. If you are selling information products, especially, they need to get to know you and build a rapport with you before they will trust you enough to take your advice. Staying in touch with them by email lets you build rapport over time. But you won’t get that second chance if you are not building an email list.

What is the wrong way to build a list?

Some marketers are just list “harlots” sending one promotion after another to their list until their list is virtually worthless, Brown says. Others provide information of little value; it’s the same information you can find at any other site.

Brown admits that’s it’s a little harder to build a profitable email list today than when he started in the late 1990′s. But it still works, if you build a list carefully by providing valuable information people can use right away and by engaging your audience in the right way.

Whenever, I am finding things a little more difficult, I go back to the basics. People are not parting with their cash right now. The recession makes people question every purchase and they want to know they are spending their money in a way that will bring them a good return.

So as a marketer, it is important to ask if what you are providing offers value that people can not find easily elsewhere.

To answer this question, I reviewed a product I bought from Jimmy D. Brown last year, his “List Profits System.” And I have to admit, I had forgotten how good it was. By working through the exercises again a year later, I was able to address my own concerns about providing value to the people who visit my website or read my blog.

If you would like to know more about Jimmy D. Brown and his ideas for building a list, download his free report, “Six Steps to Six Figures with List Marketing.”