whats the best thing to advertise??

you are not serious, right? holy cow, what a question... ever heard of targeted emails? and guess what, you sell what they are targeted at... funny...

no good offering porn to a religious list.

Have a think about it, then let us know.

Dammit! All that time spent building up that list, too! I guess I have to start over from scratch.

with random email addresses??
..........

Dude, you didn't mention random emails, didn't you?

And btw, for "random" emails, you can also promote random stuff and never get a good response at all, that's why we talk about targeting

anyway, good luck

BTW, if you harvested those emails then you can expect your web site to be black listed by spamm filters and if that happens then you can say good bye to the inbox of most mail servers such as google, MSN, Yahoo and Aol.

think about that

Good luck

AS my first post I would like to say thank you to everyone that has posted advice about e-marketing.

I would like to reply to the original poster what I did with my e-mail list.

I has developed an in-house list of about 11000 name. I was able to confirm that they like to travel at a certain time of the year, to a specific location.

what I did was the following.
I split the list into 4 segments
a) test 400 emails
b) test 400 emails
c) test 400 mails
d) 10000ish the final email.

I created a letter announcing that I was ready for business for at that location, I worked very hard to test different subject lines to find the maximum open rate and maximum click to my site rate. This helped clean my list and I removed every bounce and unsubscribe.

after that, I created a landing page that dealt with the exact subject line that produced the most clicks

on my landing page I use Commission Junction's affiliate programs to match my clients to there travel needs.

Long story short, total emails sent about 25000 ish over 15 days, 200 hours spent compiling, coding and doing all sorts of stuff, 200 bucks for the coder that helped me make a real nice fancy and reusable map. so far $103,000 in booked travel arrangements. I wont know the exact amount of money I will make until the travel is paid for, but based on what I have learned here it should be about 60%, so this will make me about $3000 or 13 per hour. Not a bad start.

and I have 11000 names that I can do this with again next year.

Now I am going to work on my next list.

BillyGood ( cause I always bill them good )

congratulations billygood, see THAT is what I'm talking about keep on having fun!