Make Your Contact Info Readily Available on Your Blog
There’s absolutely no reason to exclude contact information from your blog.
It just doesn’t make any sense. Yet…it’s rampant throughout the blogosphere. I recently participated in the BlogDay festivities by seeking out 5 blogs I had never visited before, linking to them and emailing their owners to let them know.
I was amazed at how many blogs I found that were interesting, worthwhile and that I wanted to promote…but couldn’t. No contact information.
Allowing comments on your blog isn’t good enough.
There are people out there that will want to communicate with you. Provide opportunities. Commend you. Thank you. Offer you free stuff. Help you. But they can’t if you don’t let them.
Are you worried about spam?
There’s lots of ways around that. Just write out your email address like this: byosko [at] gmail [dot] com.
Or, put a form on your blog. With WordPress there are a number of plugins for doing it. I’ved used Dagon Design’s Form Mailer, which works just fine.
Even if you’re blogging anonymously (and there are legitimate reasons for doing so), you can get a free email address from any number of sources (I’d recommend Gmail, and remain anonymous while still being able to communicate with people.
Blogging is about putting yourself out there (like being an entrepreneur!) and you can’t really do that and build a community and dialogue with people if they can’t reach out in return.
Please. I’m begging you. Give me your contact information. And don’t bury it at the bottom of the site or deep in some “About” page. Put it somewhere obvious and prominent. I want to contact you.
I use a simple plugin to creat my Contact page, but I think it really is a must for any website to have a basic contact page or address.
Hey TechZ — nice to have you around. There are a couple WordPress plugins available for creating a basic contact page.
I’m partial to putting your email address on your blog, and handling spam through whatever email client/software you use (Gmail is pretty darn good at filtering spam for example.)
I always find Contact Forms to be a little less personal than I’d like. They don’t let me keep your email address on record to email you at a later date (if I don’t want to contact you right away) and the text input window is usually small. Plus, sometimes they break! I’ve had that happen to me, and I’ve abandoned the effort to make contact.
Still, I’ll take a contact form over nothing, any day.
Thanks again for being here!
[...] To me, it makes no sense. In this case I have a technical issue with his plugin, tomorrow I might have a great opportunity for him. [...]