Driving down the highway, I thought of an interesting analogy. We were all on this highway, driving the same direction.

On a website, however, people often arrive and then scatter every direction. Blogs are particularly bad for this because most blogs are fairly busy and have a lot of different design elements. Contrast this with your typical opt-in page or a long form sales letter, where there is nothing that can be done on the page other than do what the person wants you to do or back out and leave.

When you want to convert a reader into a subscriber or a sale, you need to give them the choice and them ask them to make it. If there are too many other distractions on the site, they are more likely not to make a choice but to take one of the escape hatches. You want to force a choice.

The trick is how to apply this to a blog. More on this, perhaps, a little later.