Contacts Clues

If you have a business on a budget (and who doesn't?), need prospects for your next direct mail campaign and consider yourself a skillful Net surfer, we've got just the online marketing tool for you.

MyProspects.com is an online marketing service that offers targeted contact lists of potential customers. The site doesn't charge subscription or sign-up fees; rather, it allows users to pay only for the names they download. Users are also assigned a password to get them into the company's Web site, allowing them to conduct unlimited list searches.

Through a licensing agreement, the site offers 14 million listings from the database of credit reporting company Experian, as well as 112 million household listings from the database of Polk Co., a data provider. You can choose business listings based on demographic or geographic criteria, sales volume, number of employees, business type or years in business. A total count of the list and its price is provided; you then choose how many records to download to an Excel spreadsheet or a Word document.

One of the best features of MyProspects.com: You can generate lists containing as few as 100 names and may even pay as little as 13 cents per name using volume discounts. You're also able to download information from the Internet very quickly, including lists of 20,000 or less in a matter of seconds.

Julia Miller is a Los Angeles business writer specializing in sales and marketing.