For the sake of your long term survival and your short term profitability online, you've got to think of your business as more than just one or more products or services. Getting customers is the hard part, so the best strategy is almost always to gain their business long term.

Ask yourself or find out from your subscribers what wants and needs they have in common. It's commonly known that the online environment is especially suited to this because it costs you nothing to keep in touch with them. When done correctly, these contacts can be very profitable to you for a long time.

What's not as well understood is that for this very same reason, your survival may easily depend on how well you execute this strategy. When online businesses get more out of their traffic by doing this, they're willing to pay more for the traffic and so the cost of traffic increases overall.

And it doesn't matter whether the traffic is free or not. Because when it's free, there will be more businesses out there willing to put in the time to get this free traffic, which leaves less of it for you, at least for the time you put in. All other things being equal, if were to continue to get the same amount of traffic, you would have to put in more time.

And on-line businesses WILL be doing more of this as word gets around that this kind of strategy is the way to go. So your survival online will increasingly depend on how well you do this.

For those reasons, opt-in marketing done correctly - where relationships with your prospects and customers are a top priority - becomes more important every day. These relationships are not much different than any other. They require time. They require the trust of your opt-ins. And they require that the opt-ins see more value in what you send them than most other things they run into online or in their inbox.

That last part can be pretty tricky without the personal element. As an individual, even if you do have people working for you, you're able to use this to your extreme advantage. When you throw this into the mix, everything you do carries more value - both to you and your subscribers and customers. It becomes easier for you to develop trust and establish credibility this way. These are important because as a marketer, the highest level you can attain is that of a trusted advisor.

You personally become be most important element in your marketing when your subscribers rely on you for your recommendations and your guidance.

All of a sudden, the role you take on with your list allows you to take on a whole new perspective in your daily life because if you're tuned in, many things in your work or life outside of that could be informative or serve to illustrate a point to your subscribers. This is stuff your readers just can't get anywhere else!

When the sight of your email in your subscribers' inbox triggers the idea of you as a person in their minds, you'll naturally get more of your emails read