In our business we thrive on bringing people to our site. Whether it’s a microsite to educate visitors about a product, or a more traditional site designed to show knowledge in a market segment - our projects would fail without self promotion, traditional advertising, and word of mouth.

With all of these there is a certain level of trust that your visitors place in your site. An example, most of our sites have a ‘Send to a Friend’ link. This small form makes it easy for a visitor to send a note to someone else with a link to make it that much easier for word of mouth advertising. When a visitor uses this function they place a certain amount of trust in us that we won’t be storing these addresses for later campaigns. And, just in case there is any question out there - we don’t.

This trust is difficult to establish and even harder to keep in an online world where each of us receives a few hundred spams a day. There was a time that people felt free to share they’re email address with anyone that asked. Today, all it takes is that fourth email from your great aunt telling you that Bill Gates will come and wash you car until you begin to realize that your email address should be a protected piece of information.

This brings us to todays lesson in how not to spread word of your site. And if you’re the kind of person that clicks on links and doesn’t finish blog posts, don’t sign up for this site. The folks over at Quechup are a bit late to the social networking sites, so they have a unique method of generating new members. On sign up they ask you if you want to scan your address book for other Quechup users. If you say yes, then they email everyone in your contact database with an invite to join.

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