Your newsletter sent to YOUR opt-in e-mail list is way you get people to come back. It's how people get to know what you're about and whether they should buy from you. Of course you better not sell them crap even once or they'll be gone, but we're just talking about how to get them to point of buying for first time.

Instead of sending people to your website you should be sending them to an e-mail autoresponder. On autoresponder you should write either a note about your newsletter or your site or both along with a link to your site. Even if your site is primarily set up to capture e-mails this will increase amount of subscribers to your list much faster.

This way you have captured their e-mail for sure before they go to your site. Since your list is opt-in it means that if they don't want to be on it they can always click an unsubscribe link to get off.

If you want to increase your profits in long run you need to focus on building your list. Don't be misled by thinking that you start an online business and go out and make a ton of money first month. You can, but most people don't.

The internet marketing millionaires of today have well over 50,000 people on their lists. Lists they built over time and make more money from every time they send an offer.

You can do it too...if you stop sending people directly to your site.

During contest, each contestant was able to use a special Web page to monitor contest. They'd see top- ranked contestants and number of referrals each one had made. They could log in with their PIN and see their own referrals, too.

They were able to come back to site at any time and enter new referrals. We added a small form that would look up their PIN in case they'd forgotten it. They could send their own emails to friends to tell them about contest. They could place ezines ads giving contest details and a PIN to use.

Keeping up with all those contestants, who they referred, how many they referred, etc., was a job for a database engine. Since we had MySQL on a server we controlled, we used that. The scripting was done in Perl.

Two Perl modules were needed: DBI.pm and MySQL module for Perl. The modules are chunks of Perl code that let a script send commands in SQL (the generic language of databases) from script to MySQL database engine (program).

You can use a different database; you just need the database-specific module so Perl can "talk" to it through DBI module. DBI is needed regardless of which database you use. Specific modules exist for Oracle, PostGres, etc.

We verified email addresses of all winner's referrals; we would have to disqualify a contestant if any of addresses were faked - and award prize to someone else. We designed code so that any attempts to cheat actually decreased your odds of winning - and it was all automatic!

Thousands of names and email addresses are in database. The referral counts have been reset to zero and we are ready to launch another contest at any time we choose.

The programming effort, for most part is all done. We'll just have to edit contest page(s) and rules page to reflect new prize and new "start" and "end" dates. We can easily get *at least* as large a subscriber boost with our next contest!

Here's bottom line: You'll get more visitors, and they'll visit again and again. You get to show them your offer enough times to win their business. No matter what product or service you're selling, an automated referral contest is something you should seriously consider.