You’re preaching some very interesting stuff, which I’m already applying in my designs as well. The content is great, but then you’re packaging it in what essentially helps kill user trust; the email marketing campaign/funnel wall.You’re asking for an email address to send a public link to the book. Obviously you’re into building an email list to spam contact later with some other stuff that you can make a buck on. Then you say you’re not going to spam me, but you don’t have any control over what I consider spam.Don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not criticizing you for doing it, but I worked for 2 years for a big fish in the Email Marketing and Digital Publishing e-learning niche, where they teach these approaches to everybody, and now I know of a lot of idiotic techniques of collecting user information and “trust building”. It’s pathetic and completely misleading for the end user.Therefore, the reason I tell you this is to say that this goes against your actual content and ends up downgrading its value. Your content is great, adds value, and then you’re using a misleading technic to spread it. This might work in the sense that you will build an email list, as it does already for billion dollar businesses, but it also subtracts value from your information, in the case of users that already distrust this approach. You’ve already got a comment about giving up the email, so the list of users smelling something fishy behind this technique is already pretty large.Furthermore, if you leave it as it is, you’re going to end up with three main scenarios:The people that are not realizing this technique is bad will fill up your list, but they’re usually also the type of person that never spends anything on the internet, because they don’t get it. And yes, this applies to web designers.People that distrust this system will circumvent it by using services like Mailinator to create temp email addresses to get the PDF. So you’re going to send a bunch of emails to nobody.People completely distrusting this system will not even bother to give you an email and leave the website.Keep in mind that you’re “selling” information, you’re not selling something that uneducated people can use, where gathering emails of people that don’t realize this yet might still be useful.Hence, you’re now in a position of building an email list to sell something to later, but you’re going to end up mostly with people that don’t spend. That’s also why the lead conversions in these things got below 10%. People building these nowadays actually are told by “experts” to expect 100k emails to sell to at most 10k people, knowingly sending 90% spam emails.You might say you don’t intend to sell anything later, just want to send new information. There’s no such thing. Why bother with creating an email campaign and paying for sending emails to services like MailChimp to send free information?You’ll probably be better off making something like this: https://goodui.org/All the information is accessible without giving up anything, but they also ask for the email.I’m writing all this wanting to believe that you didn’t premeditate this and somebody “smart” just saw what you were doing with the articles and suggested this new-age business idea of creating the PDF and locking it behind an email campaign funnel, so you didn’t actually realize all this. But if you did think it out like this from the get go, knowing that the email step is completely unnecessary and its main purpose is to build a list to sell to later, then downvote away and good luck!
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