Your business will have little chance of long-term survival without a constant supply of paying customers, they are your life blood, so you should treat every customer like gold and do everything you can to retain your existing customers for the long term.

The statement above applies equally to an online, or a bricks & mortar street front business.

Many business owners are quite happy to just let a stream of customers enter and leave their business with out offering them the chance to be added to the business customer list, so that newsletters and special offers can be sent out at various intervals.

Even a first time customer who does not buy from you, could be converted in the future into a regular buyer by utilizing creative business promotion techniques.

In the business jungle it comes down to survival of the fittest, and that of the quick thinking business owner. How often have you entered a business looking for a particular product, or for information about some kind of product, only to be told, "the info sheets are over there in the rack, just grab a couple and read' em".

Did that make you feel good? I don't think so, if the sales person had spent a little more time with you showing and talking to you about the product, you may have been tempted to buy right away wouldn't you?

Let me tell you this, before getting involved with Internet marketing, I ran a successful wedding-portrait photography business for more than thirty years, over three decades there were several attempts made to start and maintain a customer mailing list, which was all done manually by the way, long before computers were used much in business.

Building a mail list manually is not easy, it can be done, but you have to work at it everyday, adding names - addresses - phone- numbers etc, it is a lot of hard work, and it was just a pain to keep up to date, and then if you wanted to do a promotion it meant preparing a sales letter, then getting it printed, stuffing the sales letter into envelopes, paying for the postage, phew, it was a huge amount of work.

It was an expensive and slow way to promote the business, the results were generally pretty good, but if the promotion results were poor, you did not feel like doing another mail out that's for sure.

Today, business promotion is just so easy to do, I shake my head in disbelief when comparing what was done years ago to how it is done today. How easy it is to set up an effective, HIGHLY profitable promotion using your computer, a mail list server to email effective promotion letters, which can be used to sell just about anything you can think of.

It beats me why more businesses don't use this simple, effective method to boost their sales when it is so easy to do? Look I'm no chicken; I'm on the generous side of fifty years old, five years ago, I did not even know how to turn a computer on...truly, like so many of my generation I was scared of them!

Now, if you took my computer away from me I would starve, I would have no way to turn my online promotions into cold hard cash. If you are not yet building your mailing list, then you should seriously think about it.

Your survival may well depend on it.

To build a qualified customer list is not difficult to do, all you need to do is use good quality giveaways & freebies to entice people to join your list, you'll build credibility and the potential for much bigger sales volume. Even a small mailing list of several hundred people could produce good results for you with the right product.

A mailing list will enable weekly, monthly or bi-monthly promotion emails to be sent out to your list, it is cheap to do, quick to set up and very effective, and very profitable if done the right way.