Marketing, in the old days, meant a lot of mail through the use of a typewriter, pens, paper and long waits at the post office. Direct mail was the best way, for the most part, of getting a lot of information out to a lot of people. In these more modern times, marketing automation systems can be used and, indeed, must be if you are to gain market share and grow your business.

The computer started the automatic revolution as it made many things easier and better looking. Mail merge helped print individual form letters, personalized in a way that the typewriter had always took so long to do. The stack of mail still needed to go to the post office, with the appropriate amount of postage and responses took days if not weeks to document.

The way to access all of the automation that is waiting for you to use is through the Internet. The ability to market to the entire world will make anyone looking for wealth, through marketing, take notice. Gaining customers from all over the world makes the efforts you made, in your neighborhood at your corner store, pale in comparison.

A blog or website is absolutely necessary when setting up a business, here. You need to have a lot of content on that site and automation can be one of the tools you use. There is software that will scour many other sites and article directories for articles to include. All of this will help you become an authority figure in your niche and help the search engines find you.

The major automated system that is critical for relationship building is an auto responder. Many marketers will not consider setting up a campaign without one. It is a piece of computer code that installs a capture form on your site. For value received, such as a free report or article, a visitor will enter their email address. This belongs to that list you hear about and this auto responder sends emails to this list on a regular schedule without anything else coming from you.

This email list is your pipeline to them in a relationship building way. This system takes an entire set of emails and delivers them, one at a time, as scheduled, so they can begin to trust you enough to buy what you recommend. This is that relationship building that delivers value as long as you do not try to force anything on them.

Other automatic systems can submit articles to various article directories and to other blogs allowing this. Article marketing has become and is still very effective as a low cost tool to bring people to your site to get captured by the auto responder. Software that can submit advertising pieces to free and paid advertising sites will help you get noticed as well.

Automated systems mean you spend less time on mundane and repetitive things. It means setting something up and letting it work for you. It means spending more time with your family and the next launch that will help you grow your bank account. These systems mean a way to connect and relate and inform and counsel and, yes, sell in ways you would not have been able to back when all you had was a pen and paper.