Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

Do you watch websites as they change? To keep the interest of our visitors, we engage in a process of trying to make our sites better, while also attempting to have our content found in search engines, but I wonder if we hold onto forms, because we think that the user will find them appropriate.

I notice that quite a few websites have been changing. Other websites seem old and stale. Do our customers notice? I ask this because I often go directly to the content of sites that I am familiar with. Most of us do not explore new sites, but rather visit a certain set of sites. We need the familiarity to navigate through easily, but change in the site keeps our interest.  We have the forces pulling at our site; moreover, small business sites have to catch the eye of the new user (customer) on a budget.  When looking at my own site, I questioned the usefulness of every element, which led me to a change in the design.
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You are a small business hoping for an additional income stream, so you turn to placing ads on your site. Did you just loose a client? Are you loosing authority?

Have you seen a good website go bad? Or have you lost respect for a site, which makes you wonder about the business behind it? These and other thoughts popped into my head this week while I was negotiating an ad for one of my sites and while looking at other sites. I think that there is nothing wrong with modeling your site after a successful web page, so why not look at what they have done to discover how it can be used in your own pages. I study. Typically, I do not look at the advertising placed on a site, because I am there for the content, yet those bits of marketing may have something useful for me. Like most people surfing the web, I have mixed reactions to someone trying to sell me more stuff, but this week I encountered a couple of badly handled sites that left them looking a bit less trustworthy in my eyes.
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Building trust with the user begins by explaining what you are doing with data you collect.

I did not think about a Privacy Policy page till I began to make money with advertising on my site. By specifying what data I collected, how that data was used, and what my intentions were for that data, I built trust with the search engines, who saw this as a step towards honesty with my clients. I realized that even if I was not selling advertising on my site that a Privacy policy was a key step in building a relationship with the visitors on the site. They may never read that policy, but they will see that it is there, and they can find out what I am doing with the facts that I am collecting.

Wether you realize it or not, you are collecting data on people by setting up a website. The analytics software which tells you how many people came to your site, their IP address, which region the came from, which pages were visited, and all of the other metrics that indicate your site’s performance come from data collected from your visitors. What this software has not collected is a specific name, phone number, and address. This data can be collected by the website’s computers leaving a cookie on the visitor’s computer. Whenever you visit a site, and you find a message saying that it sees that you are new here, the site’s server recognizes that you do not have a cookie from that site on your computer.

If you operate a blog, you are collecting a name and an email when a visitor comments. You could also be collecting that same information when they fill out a form or send you an email. For some sites, this is an opportunity to send messages to those visitors. Better sites ask permission first. However, you may not be looking at or storing those names and emails. If you are collecting them, your visitors should know and agree to how you will be using them. For example, business associations sell the data they collect to marketers. I belong to one association which is very aggressive about finding people to sell my data to, and I hate that fact, but I have to be a member for my profession.

Collecting data is necessary, and your visitors will probably understand that fact, but they should understand what you are doing with collected data. Offering them the chance to look over your intentions helps them to understand you and your site, which leads to the all important trust factor.

Should your privacy policy be written by a lawyer? If you are a small business that collects a great deal of information on a client (which could be done through a website or shared with the client through a website), you will want a lawyer involved in the creation of this document. In that case it is complex, and you need to be careful not to violate anyone’s rights. For the vast majority of small businesses, you will need a simple document going over what you collect, how you collect it, and why it is collected. Refer to the Privacy Policy page on this site to give you an outline. You will notice that my statement is a bit light-hearted. Casual statements are fine as long as they touch upon the proper points. You may want to write something more formal. Take a look at other websites that you visit to see what they may include and how they approach this page. Do not copy a privacy statement, unless you have permission to do so. You do have permission to copy mine (it would be nice to place a link back to this site to say this is where you obtained it from). You will notice that I include some information about advertising on this page, yet I have an Advertising Policy too. By including certain types of advertising on your site, you have begun to collect data on the visitor (or maybe the advertiser has). I wanted that fact to be known on that page, because it is relevant.

How does a Privacy Page help with advertising? You are not required at the time of this writing to have policy statements on your site. I think any small business should be concerned about its clientele before having concerns for any other entity. That is why I added an advertising policy to my sites after I learned the value of a privacy policy for advertising. I wanted to be open with my visitors to earn their trust. As blogs are growing, and more ordinary people are earning income from them, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating this sphere. We will have to wait to see what regulations that they will put into place, but it is wise to be ahead of the game when it comes to regulations. The other entity that comes into play would be the advertisers. They want to advertise on quality sites. In fact, they will pay more for that privilege. The simplest means to advertise on your site would be through the Google Adsense program (this is a topic for another post). I will not claim to fully understand how Google determines if you are running a quality site, but by showing them that you take privacy seriously is a first step.

Iwas trying to rack my brain to come up with a reason why you could ignore this page on your site, or what may be a bad reason for having a privacy statement on the site. I could not come up with one for a legitimate small business. It is a wise decision.