Turn a user into a passionate customer before making them sign up

sachin.posterous.com

44 points·j_baker··5 comments

If you're going to take the time to write blog posts like this one, make images, and market your site, what is spending a couple minutes signing up?

I feel more confident signing up and knowing I have a place to go where I can change settings, update content, delete comments, etc. With Posterous, I don't feel that confidence so I would tend to shy away from it and sign up with something like wordpress.com

And this is why my site http://www.memengo.com has "Try Demo" button that asks no questions and gives you a full demo right away. This button is used by a lot of visitors.

But that makes people a demo user, not a customer, before sign-up. From your site:

The downside is that you will not be able to return to where you left off later on and all the changes you made during this simple demo run will be eventually deleted.

A site like yours requires ID and security tokens to function once you've established those things then a user is effectively "signed up" already.

I see. The difference between demo user and customer wrt to posterous approach did not occur to me, but you are right - a demo user would not have as much incentive to return.

I was meaning to redo this part to allow conversion form demo to real account. This will demo more sticky.

What about using Facebook Connect? Apparently site that use it see a huge spike in sign ups.

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