Is your target market small businesses? If you haven't considered renting mailing lists for this market then you are letting a lot of potential profit slip through your fingers.

A large number of marketers rent a mailing list as a way to create a large pool of potential buyers to whom they can send information about the businesses they are promoting. Using mailing lists is actually one of the most common means of conducting direct marketing.

However, although using a mailing list is a terrific way to get a business off and running quickly and to get the orders pouring in, the probability of your success will largely be determined by the quality of the list that you are going to send your mailing pieces to.

For example, how successful do you think your campaign will be if your mailing list is full of names of people who have moved or gone out of business? And what if the addresses simple are wrong? In either case your target market will not even see your message because they will not get the mail you want delivered.

If that happens the large majority of your production costs, your mailing costs, and the cost of the list itself will be wasted. In the mailing list world old information is pretty much worthless information and it can suck the balance out of your budget and leave it dry.

In order for a mailing list to provide the results you need it needs to be comprised of the newest and most up to date information available. That's the only way you will be able to maximize your success rate.

So how can you find the most up to date mailing lists? You probably could try to find mailing list owners, interview them, negotiate a comfortable list rental price, and then test a small portion of their list. But that is pretty much a hit or miss way of conducting business.

Do you think, perhaps, that you could save a lot of time, energy, and money, if instead you contacted a number of companies that act as mailing list brokers? In other words, the people that are between the list owner and you?

If you could locate mailing lists brokers that have been in business for a substantial amount of time, a company with considerable experience in your field, you could be tapping into a gold mine. That's because if they are worth their salt they will know which lists are up-to-date and which ones are to be avoided.

They will also be able to not only help you fine tune your target market, they will be able to negotiate the best list rental prices for you as well.