Anything you read today regarding marketing on the Internet contains a section on the importance of capturing email addresses. Why? Because they should be the life blood of your marketing activities. They can be a gold mine!

Let's say you have a web site which you are effectively promoting. Your site visitors are increasing everyday. But you are not selling much. It could be your offer or it could be the site setup itself. But that could be a topic for several more articles.

Once these visitors surf through and go elsewhere, you probably won't see them again. One of the essentials to successful online marketing is follow up. Most of our sales this past year have been through either our ezine or through direct email follow up. Our ezine subscriber base, now just over 3200, has been built through a number of techniques. One of the primary techniques has been offering a free subscription on our web site. A free subscription offer is right at the top of our home page. We also have a free subscription link on just about every page at our site. All they have to do is enter their email address. Easy and quick! Plus they automatically receive an automatic confirmation.

Once they are a subscriber, they will receive each of our two weekly issues. This is our in house "mailing list" as we used to call it and is worth its weight in gold! They came to the site because they were interested in something. They also had an interest in what the ezine offered since they subscribed. And now they will be exposed on a regular basis to what we are offering.

We also offer several monthly contests and these links are on almost every page. We give away an ad on our online malls and advertising in our ezine. If you have your own domain, it's your real estate and you can just about do anything you want with the space. Giving away an online ad each month costs just about zero! Likewise giving away an ad in your ezine costs close to nothing.

What it your hosting company allows you unlimited autoresponders, like ours does. Why not have a monthly drawing for a free autoresponder. All it will cost you is your time in setting it up for the winner. Once ours are setup, which we do ourselves online, there is just about no maintenance. It's all automatic!

Give away free reports using autoresponders. Gear the report to your site theme, product or service. Our site and ezine is geared towards online marketing. We have free reports containing links to free advertising, lists of free classified advertising sites and a list of over 450 ezines. Each time someone requests one of these free reports, we automatically receive an email simultaneously with the requesters email address. These addresses go right into our follow up file. Since all are interested in advertising we follow up with an offer to become a member of the Online Classified Club and an offer to subscribe to our ezine. We have a very high percentage of sign ups to Club from these follow ups as well as subscriber sign ups.

If we didn't have these options at our site, we would be working in the dark, we would be losing sales and we would have no idea who was visiting our site. Of course you are not going to capture 100% but if you get 50% of them, your that much ahead of the game! Take a look at what you have to offer for free. Be a little creative! Think of the potential of having access to these visitors a second time, weekly or more! Capture Them!!!

Joe Reinbold, webmaster of The Entrepreneur's Home Business Link publishes a free weekly email newsletter "Home Income Quarterly E-dition" which is dedicated to assisting online marketers. For a free subscription just mailto:subscribe@homebizlink.com or visit his site at: http://www.homebizlink.com