Marketing is Expensive!

[Joshua Durrin]

Holy crap! Marketing is expensive! I went to listsource.com to build my list and had 10,000 people or so on it. I filtered the duplicates and only had names where the mailing and property addresses were whole. Further I filtered out corporations and only had absentee owners with more than 50% equity. 10,000 names is a huge expense. Then I went to yellowletters.com and saw the mailing costs were about 4x the list cost. It's clear I need to have a better targeted list to keep my costs low as I'm just starting out. What would you suggest? Should I narrow my search area (removing zip codes) or should I narrow the amount I take from each (say a percentage of names from each)? Other demographic filters you can think of? Thanks for the help.