A chronic complaint among Internet marketers is that most of the accepted methods for building a responsive list simply don’t work. This, of course, has opened the door for many of them to create products that use less conventional, or progressive techniques, depending on how you want to look at it. Among them are things such as press releases, the myriad of social networks, and mobile marketing. No doubt these things work. But so do the conventional ones; and it would be foolish to dismiss them out of hand just because you’re not getting the results that you had hoped. In this article, I want to talk about what I think is a fundamental reason behind the lack of success that so many people experience.