Most of us have a gmail or hotmail or msn email account.  Some of us may have multiple of this free email account.

Have you ever wonder why they are offered to you free?

Why do Google, Yahoo and MSN spent BIG Money to offer you a free email service? ( they need to hire adminstrators, invest in network, servers equipments etc etc…)

They are not charity organisation.  Whatever they do, they need to justify the bottomline.  Yes, they need to make money.

Understand this.  Free email hosting is the most ingenious way to generate traffic to your website.

In a typical social networking site like message board, blog etc, generating massive amount of free traffic is hard to come by.  Why?

If you are not already know, to get massive traffic, your website need to have good content. Not only that, your website must be updated with new and interesting content frequently.  Else, no one will come back to your website again after the first visit.

Blogging is the worst type of content generation platform in term of leverage.  A blogger need to consistantly update his blog with content.  Once he stop, the blog will lost its attractiveness, thus traffic will be drastically reduced.

Message boards can leverage on other subscribers to contribute to the content. However, as most message board facilitators will agree, it is VERY HARD to motivate and keep the ‘energy’ level of their subscirbers to consistently update content on their forum. 

Email is the best way to generate free content.  Most people access the Internet because they want to read their gmail or hotmail or msn mail.  They want to read the emails from their friends or associates or they want to sent out emails to their friends or associates.  Either way, free content is generated.  With targetted free content make available in email, it is no wonder read and writing email is primary the reason why people want Internet access.  This in itself is the ‘traffic’ that most webmasters dream of….

Once their email platform is proven to attract massive traffic, advertisers will then be willing to pay ‘TOP’ dollars for advertising space.  That’s where Google, Yahoo and Microsoft make their money by offering your the free email service.