1) Establishes Trust: When people visit your website, they have no idea who you are. As far as they're concerned you might be some evil person lying in wait, just trying to get your hands on their credit card number so you can run up national debt. The media is partially to blame for this unfounded fear, but you need to be aware it exists and get those visitors to trust you in order to turn them into paying customers. Publishing an ezine helps to establish you as a reputable business dealer and over time, inspires trust.

2) Brings Visitors Back: Statistics show a customer needs to see your advertising message six or seven times before making a purchase. But how do you get a casual browser to come back? When someone signs up for your ezine, mailing itself will serve as a reminder to to revisit again and again, eventually turning your subscribers into paying customers.

3) Establishes You as an Expert; Builds Brand Loyalty: Just because you're in business on web, does that really mean you know what you're talking about? By publishing a newsletter and writing your own articles, subscribers will come to see you as an expert in your field. This and familiarity they feel from reading your newsletter will reinforce brand loyalty to your site, turning many of your current subscribers into future customers.

I'd been wanting to be able to provide advertisers a better picture of my subscriber base to garner more advertising for Reading List. I was anxious to try it after considering idea, so second week I saw promotion on log- in screen at ListBot, I took bait and clicked "Upgrade Free" link. The greeting properly warned me that switching over now could delay delivery of my newsletter for a time while migration of list took place. Oh well, I'm on Sunday night deadline for my Monday a.m. delivery time, so I put it off another week.

Next week I checked in to ListBot a couple of days early to upgrade and allow "migration time" of list. I went through online set-up and was glad to see that list had been moved to ListBuilder in short order and was ready to go by mailing time a full day before next Reading List was due to go out. I updated subscribe links on over 100 pages of my site to reflect new sign-up boxes offered by ListBuilder and had a twinge of nervousness while thinking, "What if I don't like this new service and way it works? I've just cost myself some valuable time and will have to switch back to ListBot links."

I knew that I could "restore" my list after deleting it because I had seen that link at ListBot for years while sending out my newsletter. "Your list can always be restored later if you change your mind." So I continued, sent out first issue through ListBuilder and woke up Monday morning to another twinge of doubt. Should I have downloaded my subscriber list before migrating in case of a problem? Damn, I should have thought of that.

Seems there was no problem as I received my own copy of Reading List, but I didn't receive usual spate of autoresponder messages telling me that people were out of office temporarily or that they had received my message. I quickly went to public archive for my list at ListBot and checked to find it . . . "DELETED!"

Full scale panic set it and I quickly logged in to ListBuilder to see that my archives had been moved successfully there and managed to calm my adrenalin rush after a few minutes of hyperventilating. I looked for a way to view archive without logging in as I'd posted links on my site to public archive of ListBot for Reading List. They're all broken now!

More changes to my site and searching for archive links throughout my site! Damn! After spending next full week copying my archive from new ListBuilder PRIVATE list owner archive, tediously cutting and pasting to my own site all of previous issues and finally changing remaining links on my site to reflect hosting of my own archive, I sighed relief. It was over.