This is point you're missing in your advertising...

Why send them to your website at all to begin with? You shouldn't advertise a link to your website. Have your prospects send an email to your autoresponder system, and then have system send out website address. This ensures that every single person who responds to your ad will be forever in your mailing list until they either buy from you or opt off list.

Now, lets clear something up. If you want to get someone's email address these days, you have to offer them something of value in order to get it. A free course for example :-) They may have clicked on your website out of curiosity, but nobody is going to give you their email address unless you convince them that you have something of value.

If what you have for them really is of value, your sales can go up by 1000% just by doing email marketing. And, if you don't get sale first time, you can followup with your clients an unlimited amount of times until you do.

So, let's review. This time around, you advertise your fishing rod same as always. But, now you're savvy enough to know not to just send people to your website. You advertise a FREE report entitled "How to Catch 450% More Fish your First time out using 5 Simple Techniques." You can compile these reports from free information located all over Internet, and once you have it, it costs you nothing to give away. Plus... your report will basically reinforce idea that your fishing rod is best one on market.

Now, 200 respond to your autoresponder to get Free Report. You send them Free report, with a link to your website, and you load report with reasons why your rod is superior. (the report can't just be a sales letter though. If you don't provide good info, your client will feel cheated.) Now, because of informative report, out of 200 people that responded, 4 buy. Well, hey, that's no better. But, much more important, is that you now have email addresses of all 200 people.

(most people don't buy until 5th followup.)

So, instead of blindly HOPING they'd subscribe to your fishing newsletter at your site, you left them no choice. The only way they can get what they want is to subscribe right away. Every week or month you send them another interesting fishing article.

The article has to be somewhat useful, and nothing says if you're giving useful info, that you can't plug your product. Over course of next 2-3 months, an additional 20 people signup for your fishing rod. Now, that's 5X more people than first time - and you still have their email address.

You can sell these people new products as they come available, without having to readvertise. So not only are you increasing your overall sales, but you are building an exclusive mailing list that will one day allow you to stop advertising altogether!!

- You don't need an e-book compiler in order to share information or knowledge with others.

- You don't need to buy expensive Adobe Acrobat program to create e-mail workshops.

- Your target audience won't need to have certain programs installed in their computers before they can read your e-book (e.g. Acrobat Reader, MS Reader, IE 4.0 or higher for browser-dependent e-books). Present your information in e-mail workshop format - best if in plain text - and you're guaranteed they'd be able to read it straight from their e-mail clients.

- You don't need to set aside precious megabytes on your site to store your e-book.

- You don't need to worry about amount of bandwidth that will be used up each time someone downloads your free e-book from your site.

- With an e-mail workshop, you'll be able to really track people who took it. What does it matter if your tracker says 1,000 people downloaded your free e-book but you don't have a way to contact them? (And you won't ever know if they took up one of your paid offers in future.) You only have numbers with free e-books. But what you really need are concrete leads - e-mail addresses - so you can spend most of your marketing efforts on people who are in your niche.

Create a free e-mail workshop instead of a free e-book and you'll have something people will refer back to again and again. They'll only need to open their e-mail clients and click on your message.

And this is why you're better off creating a free e-mail workshop than a free e-book!