My old Signature was one of those boring 3 line sigs with company name, contact information and URL.

Any time I replied to an email message it included that short signature at end. Sure, I dabbled with other longer sigs but I never noticed much of a difference. That is, until I wised up and started targeting my sigs to each prospect...

THE FIX: Rather than use same sig with every email, I now select from a menu of four separate signatures. Each one I created is geared to assist different people. It's usually pretty simple to tell from an email message what type of product or service each person may be most interested in. Now, before I click "send" on any message, I simply use Eudora's drop down menu and select one of my four pre- written signature files.

I suggest you take a few moments to set up three or four different signatures right now. Each one will be a mini-ad designed to assist specific customers and prospects. The sigs should also carefully promote each of your top products and services.

Tip: I've found that writing signatures in a "P.S." format can be very effective since it looks like part of email message itself.

Once you're done setting up some sigs, put them into action. That's easy part... Before you click "send" on any email message, select signature that would fit best with recipient's needs. You'll quickly find that each client you deal with really does fit in well with one particular recommendation. This simple strategy can increase your online income more than you can imagine!

- NONE of addresses on these spam lists have asked to be there. Actually, NONE of email addresses on those lists even realize they are on them and they have NOT opted in to receive email solicitations.

- By "targeted" addresses these list hawkers really mean they entered keywords into an email address harvesting program and program loaded thousands of addresses from sites with that keyword somewhere in their pages. (Is that targeted?)

- A HUGE percentage of people on those lists will complain to every ISP, host and agency they can, which will shut your site down in a heartbeat.

- The USER of a bulk email list is one liable for damages that result. And there is now legislation against sending unsolicited email.

It really is simple to stay out of trouble -- just don't ever email anyone without their permission. And never trust a company that sells email addresses. If you think there is a chance that addresses are truly opt-in (and it would be a rare instance) then ask for a list of satisfied advertisers BEFORE you buy list. Contact each and every one of them and ask about their results using list.

And definitely ask company selling targeted addresses exactly HOW they built list. If they say that list members opted-in to list then ask them if they realized that list was going to be sold. You'd be hard-pressed to get 100 email addresses to opt-in to a list that was going to be sold over and over, let alone 30,000 or a million. After all, would YOU offer your email address to a company that told you up front they were going to sell address over and over?

The fact is, when it comes to marketing with email your very best bet is to build YOUR OWN email lists. You can do this by offering free reports, email newsletters, email courses, downloadable ebooks, shareware, or anything else that contains valuable information related to your area of expertise. In exchange for free service you offer, you simply ask for users name and email address.

It takes as little as ten minutes to set up an interface at your site to collect names and email addresses and deliver your free product automatically. And once you set it up your own opt-in lists will grow continually. You'll never have to even consider using spam! This strategy is 100 times as effective.

Visit Jim at http://www.bizweb2000.com where he shares exactly how he makes his living from the Internet. And get Jim's free weekly email newsletter, BizWeb eGazette by sending mailto:optin@bizweb2000.com