When asking for subscriptions, don’t ask them their age, phone number, and other demographic information, or you will frighten them away. Your subscription box is not meant to be marketing research and shouldn’t be used this way. At this point, you are creating an initial contact with potential clients. Simply ask for their email address, and nothing more, and you’ll see more subscribers.

Down road, when they know you better, you can always send out surveys to find out more.

Tip #5: Give Them a Gift

Ever since we were small children, opening Christmas presents underneath tree, we have all found free gifts irresistible. You can offer your site visitors extra incentive for subscribing to your newsletter or email communications: let them know that they will get a free gift when they sign up.

This free gift could be a white paper, a free ebook, or software that they can use. Or, you can give them access to information areas on your web site, that they couldn’t get to otherwise, when they sign up and register.

If you use this technique, you should see response rates to your subscription requests go up tremendously. Don’t know how to write an ebook? This isn’t a problem. There are plenty of sites that offer free content, reports, and ebooks that you can download, and offer to site visitors (example: just try typing in "free content" into Google, and you will be deluged with links from sites begging you to give away their content).

Tip #6: Ask Them to ‘Pass It Along’ (Viral Emailing)

In lingo of online marketing, ‘Viral emarketing’ doesn’t describe teenaged hackers bent over their computer screens, sending viruses to unsuspecting recipients. Instead, it’s a highly accepted and used method of increasing email lists. Basically, you are asking those who receive your newsletter to share it with their friends who might enjoy reading great information in it. Chances are, if they like it enough, they will click on "subscribe" link (you do have one, don’t you, at bottom of your newsletters and/or ezines?), and you will have a new address for your list.

If you really want to get information passed along, offer your readers a good incentive for sharing it with others. Some sites offer product discounts, a free ebook, or points for sharing it with others. The Internet is all about sharing information, and we love to let others know about good places to learn at.

Tip #7: Give Them More Choices

People have different needs when going online, and if you design your site and subscriptions to meet those needs, your response rates will climb. Offer your site visitors different options: some may want to subscribe to a newsletter, others may want to read your white paper, while yet others only want to hear about special product updates. Create your subscription box to offer different choices, then deliver them what they asked for.

This is called ‘market segmentation’: you are meeting needs of different sectors of your market, and is good, sound sales practice that will cause your email list to expand.

Tip #8: Develop a Relationship With Your Clients

Who would you rather interact with and trust, someone you have never heard of, or someone you have had a positive experience with before? This same principle is doubly true online. You should be emailing all of your current customers in response to their questions, to confirm product orders, and other business communications in a polite, friendly manner. They will be more likely to sign up, subscribe, and ask for product updates if they’ve heard from you before, and if you are professional in all of your communications.

If your firm is active offline, be sure to give you customers cards with your web address and email address printed on them, and ask if they would like to be added to your email list for product updates. Chances are good that they will say "yes" and you will have a quickly growing email list.

By following above tips and advice, you should see your email list growing, with highly targeted customers who want to hear from you.

Besides storage space, Google, Yahoo! and Hotmail will start claiming that their spam filters rate better than rest.

These online powerhouses hope to attract users with promise of cutting down and even eliminating avalanche of get-rich-quick, pornography, and ink-jet cartridge offers (among others) that bombard virtually anyone with an email account more than 15 minutes old.

This will, however, lead to another problem that many of them won't talk about, which involves filtering legitimate email as spam.

Unfortunately, sword cuts both ways on this issue.

So where does it all end? Never! Hotmail will enter fray with expanded storage capacity as well as promise of less spam and a more "friendly" interface to make your email life even easier.

Yahoo! and Hotmail will most likely copy Google and start serving context sensitive advertising based on content of each email message as it get viewed.

Privacy advocates will weigh in to claim that all of filtering and serving of ads based on an email message's content violates our rights to privacy and heralds arrival of "Big Brother."

But all this jockeying for position and enticing users from one email service to another actually represents a great boon for average Internet user.

It will force three of Web's biggest players to wake up and improve their services after 2 or 3 years of "business as usual" and we can all expect a few valuable innovations to result.