An autoresponder system for your site can increase your efficiency, save you time, and ultimately, by providing more information to your customers, increase your profits.

In short, an autoresponder is an automated "e-mail-on-demand" system that automatically responds to e-mails sent to specific addresses.

Now, let me go into a bit more detail so you can have a clearer understanding...

Have you ever used a "fax-on-demand" system? You know, ones where you dial a certain fax number and automatically receive a fax back without actually interacting with someone?

If so, you know they're great because they allow you, customer (or person seeking information) to get that important info quickly and easily.

Well, e-mail autoresponders work in exactly same way, only you send an e-mail to a specific address and get a pre-written response back.

But there was a problem...

For a long time, functionality of autoresponders was very limited in that you could only receive one message back. That made autoresponders a great way to send information, but they weren't too effective at increasing sales.

Here's why:

Because it normally takes 5-7 exposures (or "contacts") to a product or service before most people will buy. Clearly, only creating one contact with a single autoresponder message wasn't getting job done; people simply weren't being exposed enough to product. More importantly, trust and credibility were not being built.

Now, that's all changed. With today's new "smart" autoresponder systems, you can send a series of follow-up messages that can really increase your response rate!

Here's how smart autoresponders work:

However, what many Internet marketers forget is that nothing is free -- absolutely nothing. It's a simple, fundamental concept of economics: "There are no free lunches." If you spend time implementing a free marketing method, you've still incurred a cost: your time.

And many people forget that time is your most precious resource; you only get so much of it no matter what you do. So, consider that, depending on what your time is worth to you in dollars, it may be more "expensive" for you to use free marketing yourself than to pay someone else (or another company) to market for you.

Furthermore, remember that you can make your time more valuable by using it only for your most important business activities and therefore making your business more profitable -- yet another reason to pay for marketing and let someone else take care of it for you.

That said, let me recommend a few popular "paid" marketing services. You might be surprised at how much money you "save."

Goto.com - It's a pay-for-rank search engine. Basically, you set up an account and you place a bid on certain keywords. When someone searches for one of those keywords, your site shows up in listings ranked based on how much you bid in relation to other people who bid for keywords. You pay only when someone clicks on link to your site, not when it listing is shown. Visit GoTo.com