Robert_Charlton - 7:02 am on Mar 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

Many of these prospective clients state in no uncertain terms that the main reason they hesitate to go online is a fear of email overload.

Regarding email harvesting bots, I've used something called Hiveware Enkoder with great success. They have a free online tool where you can input your email address and get an encoded output that uses javascript to display your address properly.

I don't think, though, that this is the problem prospective clients are referring to. Most businesses that don't have websites are unaware of things like spambots. I think what they're worried about are additional customer inquiries, particularly unqualified inquiries.

What I'd tell them is that a site, if properly conceived, should be a work saving tool for them, answering many of the questions that they now deal with by telephone and regular mail. Visitors should get a great many of their questions answered by the site itself.

Beyond that, your prospects may be afraid of unqualified inquiries in particular. This is a tough one. Unqualified inquires can indeed waste a lot of time. SEO generated traffic should be more qualified than most. That is one of the great advantages of SEO... it's targeted.

I haven't searched WW for how to qualify prospects on a site, but it's an interesting question, and I think that may be at the core of what many of your prospects fear, not the spambot thing. (But if they knew about spambots, they'd worry about them too. ;))