Visitors are coming to your website, and they are browsing your marketing material; are you presenting them with barriers to entry?

I used to sneak into drive-in theaters and sporting events when I was a kid, usually in the fall, on a clear, cold, moonless night. Thick socks and Adidas® Dragones so I could run faster than the police (who were more interested in scaring me than catching me), my breath steaming as I giggled with exhilaration after the run, my heart pounding as I searched for yet another way in. It was a prank and the thrill was in testing myself to see if I could figure out a way in that nobody else had already thought of.

In other words, the thrill was in figuring out how to avoid the barriers to entry.

Let's flash forward to the here and now. Visitors are coming to your website and they are brows-ing your marketing material. Are you presenting them with barriers to entry?

Make Entry Easy and Obvious

Everybody knows at least one story where some company enters an already existing market with a more expensive item than their competitors and takes over the market. They take over the mar-ket by making the new, more expensive item easier to use and understand than the competitors'. People will pay a premium for ease of use and understandability. That premium may be time, it may be money, it might even be effort in learning how to do more with the item than could be done with previous versions of similar items. VCRs were a hassle to program until VCR+ made recording easier. Not "easy", just "easier." Now there's "one-touch" recording. Personally, I'm waiting for "Device, make sure you record... what's that show? You know, the one I always like?" and have it respond, "Yes, Joseph. I'm on it." I'll pay serious money for that and so will just about everyone else.

People will pay the extra money because this magical recording device (expect to see them next year, I'm sure) will make life easier. It'll free people up to do something else, it'll save them time, it might even save them money. How will this magical recording device do all that? Simply by removing some of the last barriers to entry in the home-recording industry.

Never Leave People in a Fogg

When you design marketing material you need to ask yourself "How much education does some-one need in order to understand this?" This question hearkens back to the Fogg Index from newspaper days. The Fogg Index was a measure of how difficult something was to understand. Did you need a high school education to read a newspaper? Did you need a college education to read one? If so, the material was too sophisticated. The Fogg Index demonstrated that newspa-pers had to be geared to a 6th grade education in order to be accessible to the largest audience.

You don't want your material to be so sophisticated and so subtle that your visitors don't get it. Don't aim high, aim low. This is especially true with introductory material. Are you concerned that the audience you want, seeing something lacking depth, will go elsewhere? Easy enough to solve; "Visitors interested in xyz click here." Are you producing a brochure or leave-behind? Again simple; "See page m for more information on xyz."

Only Give Your Visitors Tests They Can Pass

Barriers to entry are tests to your audience, whether you mean them to be or not. Do you want to find out just how sincere they are before you invest your time and effort in them? That's a reasonable test, just make sure people walk away not knowing they failed (if they do). People whose only contact with you is through a web interface or a brochure they picked up while walking past your booth will continue walking or browsing elsewhere if they know they've failed a test. They'll walk past your booth and click past your homepage and over to a competitor's before you know it. Once people suspect they're being tested -- sales professionals call it "qualifying" and good salespeople don't let you know they're doing it -- you've lost them forever. And if they get the idea they failed your test? Let's not talk about it.

Give your visitors and potential clients low hanging fruit in the beginning. They won't be insulted. They'll be glad you made it easy for them. People who want to know if you can help them are making themselves vulnerable to you. They probably won't think of it that way and you better not let them know you think of it that way. Never-the-less, that's what they're doing. Remove the barriers to entry -- make your material easy to understand and accessible -- and you've given them a reason to trust you and come back to you.

By the time visitors have picked your low branches clean, you have them speaking your language and talking in your terms. This means you've educated them. They've invested time in you and your product, not your competitor's. Now give visitors something a little bit higher because now they're ready to stretch.

Ask Visitors If You Can Test Them and They'll Play Along

Remember the computer game "Adventure?" Adventure was fun for lots of reasons; just about everybody was playing it, you could laugh with your friends over it, you and your friends could strategize about it, people would show you the maps they'd drawn of the twisty, tiny, little passages...

Ask people to take part in a game where: 

• they're always going to win (even if they don't know they're always going to win)
• they'll win something which has real value to them
• they can compete anonymously (such as an online quiz)
• or non-competitively as part of a group (like at a booth) and you've:

1) removed the barriers to entry because they've won something of real value
2) learned your visitors' level of sophistication about your product, service, company or competition
3) gotten them to invest their time learning your language, using your terms
4) kept them away from your competition
5) given them something to talk about when they meet up with everyone else.

Remove Barriers to Entry and You'll Win People Forever

I use to sneak into drive-ins and sporting events when I was a kid. Now I'm older. I don't think of barriers to entry as thrills and challenges anymore, I think of them as nuisances. I prefer straight, clean and sure paths to what I want. When I want to deal with a barrier it's because I'm playing a game and I know I'm playing a game. I'm testing myself. I don't want someone else to come along and say, "You couldn't figure this out? Boy, are you a yutz!"

Remove barriers. Make it easy and simple for people to be your client and they'll stay your client forever.

Joseph Carrabis has been everything from butcher to truckdriver to Senior Knowledge Architect to Chief Research Scientist. His 22 books and 225 articles have ranged among cultural anthro-pology, mathematics, information mechanics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, psychody-namics and psychosocial modeling - and other eclectic topics. His knowledge and data designs have been used by Caltech, Citibank, DOD, IBM, NASA, Owens-Corning and Smith-Barney among others. Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Analytics, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Develop-ment Network. He's inventor and developer of Evolution Technology and can be reached at jcarrabis@nextstagevolution.com. He'll be talking about Barriers to Entry, Turning Tourists into Lo-cals and other Usability topics at the Chicago AD:TECH in July '05.