One of the secrets to a successful online home based business is capturing your visitors' email address so you can contact them again and again. The most effective way to capture email addresses is by offering a free newsletter, free email course or free ebook.

For affiliates, capturing the email address is a bit more difficult, but certainly no less important.

If you resell products or services on your web site this is done through affiliate links. Quite often your visitor comes to your site, clicks an affiliate link and leaves; perhaps never to return again.

You MISS capturing the email address!

So how can you ensure you get that email address?

While you will never capture everybody's email address there is a way to increase the number of email addresses you do capture.

You need to redesign your web site and change the focus away from affiliate programs and towards getting email addresses.

Here are 3 web design techniques you can use immediately:

1. Offer a free newsletter on your home page or entry page and make the sign up process really easy.

2. Offer a free email course on your home page or entry page.

3. Take the affiliate links OFF your home page. You are much better putting affiliate links in your newsletter or email course.

To have a better chance of getting the email address it comes down to offering your visitors something else before giving them access to your affiliate links.

The best ‘offer' is something for free like a free newsletter, free email course or free ebook.

Believe me, altering your web site like this does work. I used to have lots of affiliate links on my home page but not many sales.

Now, most of the people who purchase through my affiliate links are already subscribers to my newsletter or my email courses.

Do not underestimate the importance of this. Redesign your web site to capture your visitors' email addresses.