[Sigia-l] Getting More Users to Register

[Anders Ramsay]

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 13:57:40 -0500, Dan Linsky <danl at davidandgoliath.com> wrote:
> I am working on an online contest where a user is shown a picture and
> must make a guess.  We are debating as to whether the user should
> register or log in BEFORE seeing the image or AFTER.

Asking a user to register means that they are providing you something
of value - a valid email address and/or a business contact and/or a
marketing opportunity of some form. They will want something if value
before giving you something of value - a preview or trial of your
product or some other form of enticement - so 'before' seems out of
the question (though I of course do not know the larger context of all
this) and I'm not sure if just seeing an image will be considered a
fair trade: "we'll show you this image, now give us your contact
information..." - it'll have to be some image for that to work :)

And as far as the long registration form goes - what information are
you collecting?  What more than a person's email address and maybe
name/address would you need purely for allowing someone to register? 
Are you maybe combining registration with some other information
collection activity?

-Anders