First of all, subscribers are not just subscribers, they are YOUR customers! If you treat your subscribers well, they will be your customers for life. What does this mean? We'll ezines are all about 'one to one marketing'.

One to one marketing is relationship marketing. Your job is to continually build and foster your relationship with your subscribers. As your relationship builds, so will trust and loyalty your subscriber has for you. As this happens you create an increasing amount of 'permission' to sell them your products -- products that provide solutions to their problems.

To learn more about permission marketing, I suggest reading Seth Godin's book, "Permission Marketing". It taught me a great deal about how to build relationships with my customers.

So now you know how to treat your subscribers -- err, I mean customers, now what you need to do is get them!

There are several ways to increase your subscribership including:

*Pay Per Search Engines:

*Pay Per Search Engines like overture.com are a great way to bring targeted traffic to your site. They charge a minimum of 10 cents per search term. For example, if you have a website that sells lamps, you might purchase search terms like lamp, light, desk lamp, light bulbs, etc. For each of these terms you are bidding for position of your listing on search engine -- highest bidders are at top.

If you want to pay less that 10 cents per search term, try kanoodle.com They start at just 1 cent per search term!

*Google AdWords

Google's AdWords is another form of pay per click advertising. With their massive reach, they can repeatedly deliver a ton of targeted leads for you.http://www.google.com/ads/

*Ezine Advertising:

When you advertise in ezines target your marketing as much as possible by choosing content related ezines. For example, to sell our lamps we might choose an interior decorating ezine but not a sports related ezine.

Competition is involved with any business. Even if you make your own, unique product, similar products will compete against yours. But existence of competition is not necessarily bad. The fact that online retailers are selling items similar or identical to your own means that people want your product. Competition is only bad for you when market is becoming saturated.

Check electronics market for a good example. Electronics go for rock-bottom prices online because there are so many stores that sell them. The difference in prices between stores often comes down to cost of shipping. Competition in this area is extreme. Electronics dealers depend on volume, and very good suppliers, to make their money. Small retailers cannot sell at those prices and turn a profit.

In order to be successful it is essential that you know what you’re up against. If you are selecting your products, then you need to know which stores already sell those products. You need to know how many stores there are, how much they are charging and, if you can find out, how well they are doing. Could you sell for less (if only a little)? What are other ways you could differentiate your store?

If you already have your product, then you need to know where and how your competitors are advertising. Are they concentrated in one location? Are there good places that they have overlooked? How much is it going to cost to compete with them for prime ad space?

So where do you begin? The answer is Overture. Owned by Yahoo, Overture is one of largest pay-per-click advertising services. What you need for research are two tools in Overture Advertiser Center. The first is Search Term Suggestion Tool. This tool allows you to look up a keyword, like “digital camera”, and find out how many searches there were for that term last month. The tool will also suggest a list of related terms, like “digital camera review”.

The number of searches per term comes from Overture’s partners like Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, CNN, etc. This is critical information because it tells you whether or not people are looking for your product online and, at same time, shows you how they are searching for it. This indicates a certain interest for your product. You may be able to judge amount of interest by number of searches for your terms. For example:

Digital Camera – 1,337,422 (high interest) Used Car – 890,346 Mountain Bike – 133,553 Blender – 26,648 Bubble Gum Machine – 1,502 Chapstick Raspberry Vanilla – 25 (very low interest)

Tip: Users searching for ‘digital camera’ are not necessarily shopping for one. They may just want information.

Also: If people are searching on Yahoo and MSN, then you can bet that even more people are searching for same things on Google.