The Little Black Book of Online Business: 1001 Insider Resources Every Business Owner Needs

Chapter 16. Co-registration

Cooperative registration is a method of getting leads from other people's web traffic. Here's how it works.

Say you were signing up for an online newsletter about gardening supplies. You would go through the subscription form, entering your name, e-mail address, and whatever additional information was requested.

Just above the "Submit" button, there would be a little checkbox, and next to that it would say something like, "Would you like a free subscription to Greenhouse Goodies? If so, check this box and you will be automatically subscribed."

If you check the box and then submit the form, you would be subscribed to the gardening newsletter as you had originally planned, but your lead information would also be sent to the company managing the Greenhouse Goodies newsletter.

Co-registration leads have an extremely short life span and should be followed up on within minutes for best results. If you wait hours or longer, the subscriber will likely forget about his or her impulsive click and may consider your e-mail communications to be unsolicited—prompting allegations of spam marketing against your company.

Because of this, you must be extremely careful when implementing a co-registration campaign. Getting the co-registration service to host your response e-mails and web pages on its server will help you to insulate your own company's reputation against errant spam claims.

And speaking of errant spam claims, they can be just as damaging to your operations ...