In 1979, CompuServe became first service to offer electronic mail capabilities to personal computer users. Most early adopter types were computer geeks already and were not offended by odd numeric email addresses, nor did they mind being represented digitally by a string of digits. Hence, odd looking email ID's such as cs10457882.32@compuserve.com were common for years.

Now that email is becoming an expected and necessary element of business communications, be aware how often it is seen and used by clients and customers and impression it makes on them each time they see that address showing up in their in-box. Few of old Compuserve members with numbers for email addresses remain. Numbers were assigned to those early members to identify compuserve accounts and served to efficiently turn those people into bits of data for old, slow computer systems of just a few years ago.

Unfortunately, we seem to be headed back in that direction as more users than available names exist at service provider email accounts. If you attempt to sign up with an email account at America Online, Hotmail, Yahoo or other national internet service providers, you are likely to find that name you choose is not available. They'll offer you odd variations with strings of numbers attached to differentiate you from hundreds of others who've chosen that name. So JohnDoe654298475@aol.com might be offered instead when a John Doe gets a new AOL screen name today. The same is true of Yahoo and Hotmail addresses.

Most of us operating businesses online are aware that it is possible to have almost any name we can dream up attached to our own domain name and that we can have nearly any email address we like, but few use that ability to choose an online identity creatively or with much business sense. So it is quite common to see bland generic names such as info@yourcompany.com or even some web-based email accounts at generic hosts such as Hotmail or Yahoo just because small business owner is not aware that they can now have an email address that reflects their own domain name to further brand their business.

Perhaps to conserve hard drive space or to reduce clutter and confusion, you've saved few copies of past messages. Or maybe you've saved many in past but have later been tempted to delete them.

Let me suggest that those old email messages may contain more value than you've ever imagined. I'm going to share some ideas in this article that may help you look at them in a new light and to gain more value from them.

1) FAQ Page Creation and Updating.

As you look through archived email messages, are there certain questions that prospects have often asked about your products or services? Remember that for every prospect who takes time to email you a question about one of your products or services, there likely have been several more with similar questions who haven't.

In order to save time for yourself and your prospects in future - and to close more sales - you may be wise to compile answers to common questions into a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) web page or autoresponder. At very least, you may at least be able to reuse your replies to previous questions to answer future ones, instead of creating them from scratch each time.

2) Ad Copy Improvements.

The same idea applies to your ad copy. The more questions, concerns or sales objections you leave unanswered or unaddressed, more potential obstacles stand in way of a prospect's buying decision. Your email archives likely hold valuable clues for ways to better address those issues by updating and improving your ad copy.

3) Ideas for Additional Income Streams.