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Your website works as your spokesperson presenting the message you wish to convey. Thinking in terms of this analogy often helps you to look at your website from a different angle and make visitor-friendly changes.

Imagine a situation – you have to make an announcement about an exciting event or an opportunity. You have appointed a spokesperson to make a presentation on your behalf to an audience consisting of invitees, interested persons and on-lookers. How would you like her to perform? Your website should do the job of a real, living spokesperson. Following considerations will make your website more presentable.

1) Main Theme – The presentation in the above example has been organized for a particular occasion. Similarly each webpage should be built around a particular theme. It doesn’t help if too much information is given on a webpage on seemingly unrelated issues.

2) Fast Opening – You would certainly not like your spokesperson to be late and make your audience impatient. When a visitor clicks URL of your webpage or is redirected there, the webpage should open real fast. Your webpage gets just a few seconds to engage your visitor’s attention. You would like your visitors to spend those few seconds looking at your webpage rather than waiting for the webpage to open.

3) Appearance – The spokesperson should have pleasant appearance and should wear a welcoming smile. This is to ensure that the audience is not put off even before start of the presentation. Your webpage should have a pleasant, inviting appearance to attract your visitor. If spokesperson is very gorgeous looking, she will distract attention of the audience from the real issue. Your website should avoid loud graphics and distracting colors so that the visitor remains focused on the main theme.

4) Make Text Interesting – You would like your spokesperson to use clear, flowing language, keep the audience interested and gradually lead them to the main theme. The presentation should be interactive, made lively by stories, snippets etc. Monotonous speech should be avoided. All these ideas can be incorporated while designing the website. The text should be broken into small paragraphs of 4-5 sentences or less, subtitles should be added for clarity, key words should be made bold. These are some ideas to make text more readable. Often a visitor will see only titles and subtitles. Therefore on their own the title and subtitles should convey the basic message.

5) Highlight Benefits – Other methods can be used to make the audience interested. The audience is really interested in what benefits they will derive; therefore this point should be highlighted sufficiently. The visitor to a website is interested in what is there for her. The potential benefits to the visitors should form a part of the main theme. This is an important consideration and cannot be over-emphasized.

6) Free gifts or Bonus – The audience attending the conference can be given gifts – after all they are investing there time for the presentation. The website can also offer several incentives to the visitors and lure her to visit again and again. Free ebooks, subscription to newsletters, links to related resources, articles and additional information are some of the simplest incentives that can be offered to the visitor.

7) Anticipate Questions – When a question is put up to the spokesperson, she should accept it with understanding showing that she had been expecting the question and was prepared to answer it. This approach will re-assure the audience as they develop the feeling that “everything has been taken care of”. While designing a website anticipated questions should be compiled and answers should be provided. It may be helpful to provide separate pages displaying common questions and answers.

Testimonials – After the end of the presentation, very few people are likely to sign-up immediately. Those who are still interested after the presentation would like to take some time to decide. They are likely to seek additional information and confirmation of the information already provided. The spokesperson should clearly spell out how easy it would be to get any further information. Visitors to the website often re-visit several times before they take any decision, particularly the decisions involving money transaction. Testimonials and endorsements appearing on the website are very effective in getting a favorable response from the visitors.

9) Follow-Up – During a presentation it is common practice to register the names and other details of the participants. This information can be used to follow-up with them by sending further messages. The website should be used to perform a very important function of capturing names and e-mail addresses of interested persons for following-up with them.

Thinking of website as a spokesperson adds a human dimension with which we are more familiar. Reviewing your website from a new angle can reveal ways of improving it.

When people negotiate, they want to experience autonomy. In essence, they want to feel like they’re in control throughout the negotiation. As such, they don’t want to be brow beaten or set upon, when they offer suggestions and potential solutions during the negotiation process.

You can allow your negotiation partner to experience autonomy by acquiescing to her demands, agreeing to the direction in which she moves the negotiation and by giving her the level of control she seeks throughout the negotiation. The question you’re probably asking yourself is, if I allow my negotiation partner to experience control to that degree, why should I bother to negotiate? Won’t I put myself at a great disadvantage by doing so? To which I reply yes and no.

Yes, you may give the appearance of being a weak negotiator and depending upon the person you’re negotiating with, he or she may try to exploit their perceived advantage. If that occurs, you will gain additional insight into the mental makeup of the person and what they might do if you give them too much control. In essence, its a balancing act. The thought that comes to mind is, you can give them enough rope to hang themselves, but not so much that they hang you.

While putting yourself at a perceived disadvantage you do so for the time it takes to make the person you’re negotiating with feel comfortable, or guilty enough to give back to you that which you seek from the negotiation. You accomplish your goals by making those goals your partners goals.

You allow your negotiation partner to experience autonomy and still reach your goals by planning the direction you’d like the negotiation to go in during your planning stage. In the planning stage, you need to assess where there might be overlay between the goals you share with your negotiation partner and create a path that the negotiations can travel to take advantage of that overlay.

Remember, control is perceptional. To the degree that someone feels they are in control, in any situation, in their mind, they are in control. Thus, it behooves you to convey the submissiveness they seek from you in order to project the feeling they need to experience in order to feel empowered. If they feel empowered to set the pace of the negotiation and thus set the negotiations direction, they will also have the degree of control they need to help you reach the goal of the negotiation.

You may have to walk a fine line when allowing your negotiation partner to think he’s in control of the negotiation. As long as that person stays on the path that you set, you will be okay and everything will be right with the world.

The negotiation lessons are…

• Always understand and apply the importance of autonomy during a negotiation. To the degree that you can allow your negotiation partner to experience autonomy, she’s more apt to stay engaged throughout the negotiation.
• During the negotiation, seek opportunities to bond or break the bonding process based on the degree of autonomy you allow someone to perceive they have. In this way, you can use the experience of autonomy as a tactic or strategy.
• Remember that control and thus autonomy is a matter of perception. To the degree that you allow others to experience autonomy, they will be more likely to grant you what you desire.