While browsing for new sites using StumbleUpon today–I do this a lot and there’s a ton of great stuff out there I might not find otherwise–I found an interesting blog on Internet marketing and on top of the blog itself being pretty interesting it had this neat little WordPress plugin that displayed a special one line message across the top of the page.
What struck me was the message seemed customized to me. I’m assuming it uses the referrer data but it appeared to know I had entered the site from StumbleUpon and greeted me saying something to the effect of “You found me from StumbleUpon, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed if you like what you find here.”
I thought that was kind of cool and can see a lot of great uses for such a plugin on niche blogs as well as here at the Leap.
The plugin also gives the developer who made it free links with anyone using it, if you look at the image you’ll see the link to the far right of the yellow stripe… so that’s cool for them and was lucky for me since I wanted to grab this plugin.
So I go to the developer’s site from the link and find that not only do they want free links on my site in exchange for using the plugin, but I’ve also got to join their mailing list before I’m able to download the plugin???
Really, you want free links AND and an email capture for the plugin? Sorry, you lost me there.
I’d have used your plugin, I’d have provided you with tons of free backlinks in exchange, or I might have subscribed to your list if the backlink wasn’t included on the plugin.
But I won’t do both. The plugin isn’t really that cool after all, and if I want its functionality in the future I’ll pay someone $30 over at elance or Rent-A-Coder to get it on more friendly terms.
The lesson here is it’s okay to try to get the most out of what you’re doing, but force people through too many hoops and they’ll start weighing the value of your offering against the efforts neeeded to get it… and then you risk losing them completely.
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