As you may already know, I do all of my work on the internet. My primary method of contact with other people (fellow site owners, bloggers, sponsors) is e-mail. It’s not uncommon to receive 50-60 legit e-mails a day, and send out just as many, or more. As important as e-mail is, it is all useless if you can’t find the right person to contact to begin with.
I run into this issue more than I consciously think about. Yesterday, I decided to update my news e-mail contact list. This involves checking the sites of everyone on my contact list to verify their site still exists and is active. You would be surprised how many tech sites fall off the face of the planet or simply quit posting updates.
Once this is complete, it was time to search the net for new sites to send our news releases to. This can be a time-consuming task, no doubt. Once I find a new site, I then have to locate their contact information… and this is where the frustration begins.
If you run a website or a blog, your contact information should be readily and easily available to your users. I have found myself searching a site for 20+ minutes, trying to locate an email address to contact the owner or the news editor without luck. Seriously, what are these people thinking? How do they expect their readers or potential sponsors to get in touch with them if they offer no contact page at all?
I have had this same problem with blogs as well. A few months ago, I found a really good blog and wanted to contact the author to ask him a question. Guess what? I couldn’t. They had no type of “contact” or “about” page at all. Absolutely terrible.
In closing, if you run any type of website or blog, don’t forget to include some way for your readers to contact you. If you don’t, you will most likely miss out on some important opportunities or even worse, lose readers.
Still gets to me though and you never see the message it sends me.