If you choose to use a company to host your lists there are important advantages as well.

Let us look at them now:

• A company that specializes in email marketing will have more technical expertise that will save you having to learn to install and maintain a script.

• One of the major advantages today of using a company is that they know how to fight all the overzealous spam measures that sometimes filters out legitimate emails. In other words, a company will get a listening ear quicker from AOL than just an individual business owner. This is becoming a major factor as email response has dropped considerably because of filtering software and so called black-listing.

• If you are just starting out you are not required the upfront investment as when you buy a script. A good autoresponder script may cost $200, whereas an autoresponder subscription service may just run you $20 per month. By the time you are in profit the autoresponder service will be able to pay for itself.

• Most companies have an affiliate program that you can join and so recruit other users, turning a needed service into an income opportunity.

Those are the major advantages and you must choose what is more important to you. If you are not a 'techie' you should definitely go with the company service since the learning curve is less steep.

Some people like to know that they have full control and so will prefer to use a script that they can install the fully control.

The real challenge today with the spam filters and the low response rate of email marketing as a result is email deliverability.

More and more marketers are finding that using a company service increases the chances of their email getting through.

Now, whatever route you take you will have to learn how to integrate an email capture form within your website.

The HTML code is normally generated by the autoresponder service.

You simply have to cut and paste this into your web page where you want the form to appear. You will also have to choose an email address that will trigger the auto-response email. But this is as technical as it will get.