Bouncing traffic on blog: one big cause- blogger cannot be contacted

A blogger friend created a great blog template, added great content, made links to and fro, put AdSense advertisements in the sidebar, linked the blog to her Facebook account and waited for people to flock her blog and businesses to flood her with offers. 

One year past, she had about a hundred posts, a hundred comments, a few thousand visitors but no business proposal. As it was a beauty blog, she'd expected at least a few inquiries from beauty product sellers.

After about a year, she asked ITB for a quick review and also asked this straight question: 'Why am I not getting business inquiries'. 

After about three weeks of our review came her reply. She is blessed with good writing skills and her reply says it all; so, instead of explaining why you must have your email ID on the blog, we reproduce her reply:

My God! I did not realize so long that there was no way visitors could share something privately with me. They could not ask for advice or my personal take on a product. And yes, there was no way businesses could talk to me! 

The comment box was there and it was for everyone to see, I had thought. If visitors wanted to contact me, they could have made a comment asking how to contact me. On my Facebook account, anybody could chat or send a message and these won't be public. That's what I had thought. I was also influenced by a friend's sincere but unhelpful advice that ladies should not disclose their personal details on blogs - and that included giving email ID.

For some time, I indeed had my email account written in this form (which I had adopted from a friend's blog): abc [at] gmail [dot] com. Later I removed even that when I started getting spam mails. I was sure, I received these mails because I had made my mail public on the blog. I still receive such mails, and in my stupid analysis, I was till now attributing them to the earlier email details on my blog. 

Now that I have made my email public on the blog and in fact displayed it prominently in two places, I have received two business ideas and two requests for promoting mutual blogs - just in 15 days. I am grateful to you that you drew my attention to a very small but important thing I was ignoring. 

ITB keeps posting tips for improving blogs. Even insignificant-looking tips can help bloggers in a big way as these serve to 'draw their attention to a very small but important thing they might be ignoring'.