Marketing thru email lists is a smart idea and can be very affective. For those who do it correctly they can really do well, for those that do not they often find huge attrition rates in their email marketing lists.

Nobody likes SPAM and spamming is dead if you are serious about your credibility in an industry. Opt in e-mail marketing is the only way to go. Yet you can destroy your reputation and lose members very quickly if in fact you do not pay attention to what you are doing.

Offering affiliates use of your e-mail lists can cause problems and it is hard to watch over your affiliates and when one crosses the line, often by the time you find out, all those emails have already been sent and you can watch the numbers of folks dropping off your list and deciding to opt out.

You must protect your email lists and those opt-in members from aggressive, unprofessional and intrusive email advertising from your affiliates. Developing a good list of happy opt-in email recipients is not an easy thing to do and keeping them is even harder if you are not careful to send them only meaningful material in-line with what they originally signed up for.

Additionally once you lose them, they may never come back. If you are in an industry specific endeavor your total number of potential opt-in email customers will be limited. Consider all this in 2006.