Pop-ups are a great way to deliver opt-in forms or alternate sales messages to your visitors, but if you have a content-only site, or you don't collect the addresses of your surfers, you may want to reconsider. Here's why:

Overall, Internet users have fairly strong opinions about pop-ups, and they aren't positive.

According to recent Internet surveys, as many as 38% of all surfers have a negative association with pop-ups, regardless of how they are used. They find them annoying and intrusive.

Worse yet, just over 10% of all online users consider pop-ups as bad as, or worse than, spam (unsolicited e-mail). Some Internet purists will not buy from, or return to, sites using pop-ups.

Certain audiences consider pop-ups bad form. Generally, people from academic, engineering and science backgrounds dislike them, as do highly technical users and privacy defenders.

Code intensive, multi-window pop-ups, including those used by many adult and gambling sites, can crash browsers and lock-up entire operating systems, forcing the user to reboot their computer!

(Don't worry; the examples we give in this course are simple, tested, bug-free, and proven to work perfectly for virtually all Internet users.)

Finally, people on slow Internet connections often have trouble with pop-ups because they increase a site's load time if they aren't installed properly, as do surfers who turn off their images or JAVA commands.

Should you use them?

Nonetheless, more and more professional business owners are using pop-ups, simply because when deployed correctly, they work.

Unless your target market is a dot org, dot gov or dot edu, or you have no intention of using your site as a business tool, you should definitely see whether or not they positively impact your bottom line.

Since the third quarter of 2000, everyone from MSN and CNN, to AOL and Excite, have tested (and continued to use) pop-ups. So far, we aren't seeing any sign of them backing off.

Once a site owner learns how responsive they are, they become a permanent part of their marketing arsenal.

Control the user's desktop!

Folks, this may come as a surprise to you but pop-ups are the last legal way to deliver an unsolicited message to a surfer online. And, they are the only way to present a "second chance" offer to someone who visits your site, then leaves without making a purchase or opting in to your list.

This fact alone makes them so powerful, you would be foolish not to test them if you want to improve your profitability (and who doesn't).

The costs to attract targeted, qualified prospects to your site are on the rise. Pop-ups are the easiest way to "squeeze a few more percentage points of revenue" from a Web based business. In many cases, this is the difference between failure and success.