Have you ever heard someone spout some jargon and not have any idea what they were talking about?

It happens to me all of the time. People talk about their CTR or CRM and I just nod my head like I know exactly what they are saying. Then as soon as they stop talking, I go straight to Google to figure it out. It's annoying and intimidating.

People assume you know what they are talking about and they never take the time to fully explain it to you.

So throughout this course I'm going to take the time to make sure you don't get lost in the jargon. Let's take 5 minutes to make sure you and I are on the same page about what an email list is. Sound good?

Two different types of email lists

When I first started my blog, I had no idea what an email list was.

I had no idea of all of the technical complexities involved in sending an email to 100 or even 10,000 people.

Think about how you send an email now.

Step 1: You open Gmail.

Step 2: You type in the email address of the person you are going to send an email to.

Step 3: You type your subject and message, then press send.

If you wanted to send the same message to 5 friends, you would just type all of their emails into the TO: field.

But what if you wanted to send that same message to 100 people? 1,000 people? 10,000 people?

You could keep a spreadsheet with all of the emails addresses in it and copy and paste them into the TO: field every time you wanted to send an email.

But there are a few problems with that approach.

1. Everyone would see everyone else's email address. (Can you say spam?)

2. If someone hit reply all, everyone would get the message. (Massive annoyance!)

3. Gmail limits the total number of people you can send an email to. (Not scalable.)

4. Every time someone new told you they wanted to get your emails, you would have to manually add them to your spreadsheet.

Doing it this way is fine when you need to send an email to 2 or 3 people, but if you want to build an email list of 500 subscribers, it will be a massive pain in the butt and a huge time suck, not to mention illegal.

Yes, illegal! (More on that later.)

However, at its core an email list is exactly what it sounds like: a list of email addresses from people that have asked you to communicate with them.

The other part of an email list 

To get around the legalities and headaches of sending out mass amounts of emails, businesses started creating software to manage the entire process.

These services are called email service providers, or ESPs for short.

A proper ESP allows you to type your message one time, press send and instantly deliver that message to 1,000s of users. All without you doing anything manually.

Pretty straightforward, right?

In the next few lessons, we'll set up your email service provider account and send your first email.