One of the things I've noticed is many marketers are now using forced "Capture pages" to collect information on their prospects.  I understand that this is an easy way to keep track of visitors to your site but have you thought about the drawbacks?  Don't let anyone fool you there are drawbacks.

The first draw back is this.  If you have set up a capture page and your prospect is blocked from information on your product or service unless they put information into the capture page first,  how many just navigate away from your page and go somewhere else?  People are becoming more aware of the dangers of giving information over the internet and view collecting of their e-mail address etc as a danger.  They consider the implications of spam generation and viruses attached to e-mail from unknown parties and you are an unknown party.

The second drawback is what do you have to hide?  If you will not let a prospect see your information, why not?  If your information is good and your opportunity is solid why are you blowing smoke in their face with a lot of hype and not allowing them to see what you are offering up front?  A headline screaming "Make $5000 a week from home" with some tanned guy lounging on the beach telling you how great his life is is not information, it's hype.  So now you not only want to collect their information you want them to  spend more time clicking through to another page to find out whether they are interested or not.  Why are you wasting their time?  It doesn't matter that you don't think it's a waste of time, what matters is that they see it as you wasting their time.

Don't get me wrong, capture pages in themselves are not bad, its how you set it up that can be negative.  By all means have a capture page to collect information IF they want to give it to you.  Those who are interested in what you have to offer will give you the information.  If they are not interested why are you forcing them to provide you with information?  Are you planning to annoy them to death with unwanted and wasteful spam autoresponder messages?  That's a waste of your resources and a source of resentment for them.By not requesting information up front people don't look at you as a source of spam.  Being labeled a spam generator is the worst thing in the world for a business. 

Last but not least by having a voluntary capture page, they see what you are offering and make a choice.  You weed out the no's and get get the maybe's and yesses. 

Of course like anything else you'll get the tire kickers but you won't be wasting your time on people who are not interested and don't want to be bothered.  We all know it takes multiple exposures in many cases to get a sale but just because you expose someone multiple times does not mean that they are going to buy.  So gathering information and constantly annoying someone who is not interested is not going to get you a sale either.