Procrastinating Entrepreneur

Just as I do every morning I get to work and fire up my personalized daily newspaper (aka Google Reader) and start browsing the latest articles from my favourite news sources.  This morning I came across a couple of articles that were discussing making “first contact” via your website and wanted to make a few comments.

The first article I came across is by one of my favourites Seth Godin.  Seems that Seth was trying to gather up some numbers for a new project and was finding it difficult to use the contact forms on the sites he was visiting.  So much for making it easy for your visitors to get in touch with you, eh?  Frustrating visitors is a sure-fire method of creating additional barriers to building permission.

I realized that I am guilty of making it difficult.  I continually advise friends and clients to avoid putting their email addresses on their sites at all cost.  I do this for one reason, and one reason only – spam!  But after thinking about what Seth had to say maybe I am going about this all wrong.  Maybe I should be making it easier for folks to contact me, and concentrate on building systemized ways to deal with the (assumed) increase in garbage email.

Continuing to browse my reader, I notice an article by Chris Brogan about email management tips.  The article is great, and being a geek, I love the fact that Chris is using Google Docs as the source for his form, and the fact that behind the scenes it’s keeping a spreadsheet of all the correspondence that originates from his web form.  Totally cool!  I follow the link to his form and wham! I see the image on the left.  Now, I realize that I am browsing from a corporate network, and our rules are a little on the strict side, but I am sure that I am not the only person who has run into this before.  Kind of flies in the face of what Seth was mentioning doesn’t it?  Now Chris does provide some contact info over in the right-hand column, but it’s not very obvious, and it’s not a link so I have to open my email client, and type the address in, etc., etc. Not super easy is it?

Maybe it’s time to revisit my sites and have a look at ways to remove the barriers to “first contact”.

Tags:   chris brogan · permission marketing · seth godin · web contact formsNo Comments

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