It depends I think how much money, how often and in exchange for what. If you are paying out big amounts in exchange for "labor" (e.g. paying freelancers who do work for other users), checks, ACH, and wire are the only serious solutions unfortunately. For smaller amounts and gift/bonus type payments, you might be able to use electronic gift cards (e.g. Amazon)-- if I recall, you only need an email address and possibly name to send a "gift card" this way.
Address it early with people who need to know (direct team and people who work with this person frequently). Be honest without going into too much detail. If people press for details you can't or don't feel like sharing, tell them you can't share.
Don't make up a softer story to cushion it-- this can bite you big time. there have been companies that have been sued and lost because a manager used the "Tom left to spend more time with his family" white lie, because it masse jurors believe that Tom had been fired due to familial status (a no no).
The best blogging platform is the one you'll use. It sounds silly, but what it means is forget about any that take a bunch of time to set up or maintain.
I think fully hosted solutions are great because you can spend basically zero time setting up and maintaining backend. Wordpress hosting is good. Squarespace also has a pretty slick solution.
My best advice is to find sites you like with similar functionality to what you need and try to find out who did those. Often companies will share who they used. If it is an internal person then he or she might be willing to share inspirations or point to freelancers with similar approaches.
Note that this isn't really about the "look." Good designers are flexible enough to work in many styles and are always trying to solve your unique problem. What you are trying to spot is quality and familiarity with the technologies you need.
Basically, it is saying use the twitter model, not the email model. Let people choose what to receive and encourage them to publish everything globally (yes, with private messages if you really need it).
So many problems. If this is for geeks, why would I pay telegram to do what basically any static page cms does? If this is for normals why call it a cms? In either case, why the complex description of what it does? Why does it not tell me why I should want it? And the pricing scheme is clear as mud.
A) Use something off the shelf. Simple and cheap is best when starting out so that you can focus on finding business.
B) Explain exactly why the customer should fill in the email. I don't like bribing the customer with some other unrelated thing, like a white paper because people who want the whitepaper just want the white paper. They might not be your actual customers. Instead I would honestly say (example) "Do you want awesome deals on physics and astronomy instruments? Well we're going to find deals for you and send an email every month."
C - Niche products need niche sales strategy. Find out where your customers spend time and figure out how you can get in to meet people. Explain what you can do for them and ask for an email on the spot.
You are right. The landing page should be clear and has a clean call to action describing only one goal. That is, how the customers/users will be benefited by providing their contact information such as email and which products or kits do they want at a ridiculous price.
What the other posters said. I would add that if this is disruptive you could try using a visually hidden field with a special value. If the field gets tampered with, you can flag it as likely spam. This works because the bot just traverses the dom and fills in fields that look like comment boxes (textareas) with spam.
