Website Owners and Visitors- Renegotiating the Deal

For years website owners have been giving away far too much for free. Just look at the effort that goes into websites compared to the rates at which they convert visitors into customers. Only two visitors in 100 (at absolute best) make an enquiry, and many fewer than that will complete a purchase. If websites were retail stores the cost of keeping the carpets clean would vastly outweigh the profits from any sales.

So we need to renegotiate the contract between website owner and website visitor. And the changes to the EU cookie law present the opportunity to do this in an open, honest manner.

Let’s be clear here: I am talking about the relationship between businesses that_ own_ websites and their customers, rather than businesses that are websites and online services such as Facebook.

Businesses invest vast amounts in making their websites content-rich in order to attract higher search rankings and present themselves as authorities in their subject. I’ve been coaching businesses to do this for years because it is an effective way to address the changing nature of procurement.

But it is a model with flaws:

• If you want to capture information about your prospects, you have to put the good stuff behind a form of some description. This will likely reduce its visibility.
• If you put your documents out there freely you will likely get more attention but won’t know anything about your prospect.

Bird in hand vs two in bush.

Companies have tried to address this by mixing and matching - some content in front of the form and some behind. But this is still flawed.

What you want is to give everyone who visits your site easy access to all of your great content but still have the ability to see who they are and what they’re interested in.

This is what Prospect Analytics allows.

Now the EU cookie policy has forced most companies to present some sort of notification to their website visitors. This is the ideal opportunity to be completely transparent with visitors about the new deal: You can still get all the same great content, but we’ll now be paying attention to what you get.