Seth’s Blog: Helping Jack with web design:

“You only have four paths:

1. get someone to buy something right now

2. get someone to give you their email address so you can build a relationship

3. get someone to tell a friend

4. get someone to go to another page on your site.”

Path Number 2 is the basis of most of Seth’s ground-breaking work on permission and viral marketing. But with the increasing pressure on e-mail as a commercial channel (spam filters, viruses, low-response, overload, consumer awareness of privacy and identity theft), I’m not sure that this is still a top priority.

It would be easy to say that Path 2 should be “get someone to subscribe to your feed so you can build a relationship.” Unfortunately, RSS Feeds are not yet ready for prime-time so we’re stuck at this point.

I wonder what happens to Permission and Viral marketing when everyone things that giving their e-mail address is the path to more spam and just stops filling in those boxes?