I recently praised the blog No More Cubes about an ingenious marketing tool to increase newsletter subscriptions: the contest. After blogging my praise, I decided to put my money where my keyboard was and subscribed to the blog. I wish I could say that the praise would continue for No More Cubes.
When my subscription was confirmed, I discovered that No More Cubes is Kimberly’s blog. Hmm…. I guess I didn’t realize it before, but I know VERY little about Kimberly. Worse yet, I still don’t know Kimberly’s last name. She knows my first and last names in addition to my email address, but I only know Kimberly as “Kimberly “freedomworker.”
So I go to the blog. Not much there. From looking at her blog, it appears Kimberly works with clients in a marketing capacity, but there’s nothing on the blog to tell me why I should read what Kimberly has to say.
About now, I’m wishing that I hadn’t used my real email address to subscribe to the No More Cubes newsletter. I have a hotmail email address which I use for “low trust” publications, a club which the No More Cubes newsletter has now officially joined. All because Kimberly didn’t disclose her last name.
With that said, I get the privacy issue. As a women on the internet, it’s one I deal with as well. Way back in 1994, I launched my web development career by developing a web site in support of the CDA, a bill which was very controversial back in the day. It “limited” free speech on the internet by protecting children from pornography among other things, something that I supported as a mother of three. My views at the time got me dropped from my ISP and also generated more than a few death threats. At the time, I lived in a tiny town of less than 1000, so it wouldn’t have taken someone long to do a door to door search to find me and mine.
However, shrouding oneself in a veil of “privacy” isn’t the path to inspiring trust. Trust is SO hard to build via the internet and No More Cubes has done MANY things right in the pursuit of building trust.
The first step in inspiring trust is through a professional site design. It’s a fact that a slick design inspires trust. It’s why, if you’re not a graphic designer, that purchasing a web site template is probably the best investment you’ll ever make. I once did a redesign for a site where the content remained the same but the affiliate income generated by the site increase over 450% in the next quarter. All because the graphics on the site were replaced with high quality, professionally created images.
No More Cubes did that with her blog design. It’s slick and it inspired trust. Too bad she dropped the ball on her newsletter. Make sure you don’t hurt your credibility by trying too hard to protect your privacy. It’s one thing for a subscriber to provide “fake” credentials. (As a newsletter publisher, you should expect them to do so.) It’s quite another when the publisher tries to hide his/her identity.
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