Continuing my train of thought on finding new alternatives to advertising as a revenue model for web-based businesses, it occurred to me recently that yet another greater business need than exposure (which is what advertising gives to a business) is conversion – converting eyeballs to users or buyers. Businesses collectively pay billions to Google to get new visitors to their websites but what happens once they get there? Beyond relying on their own copy-writing skills, what tools are available to businesses to help convert those visitors to users?

I did a little bit of research consisting solely of a blog search on tools for converting visitors and the only two tools I found were a very interesting service called EyeView and another called Involver. From what I can make out, EyeView and Involver seem to let you build interactive and direct calls to action into your tutorials and adverts respectively. Personally, I like EyeView’s tutorial approach better – you teach visitors how to use your service or product and right from within the tutorial, you enable them to begin using it. It appears that EyeView supports an option to pay per conversion. Wonderful!

I started to think that given the right execution, market conditions and guidance; and provided they don’t get gobbled up along the way, either of these two companies or some other similar one, could well become the next Google. However, I soon remembered that Google did not become so successful by simply providing a service to businesses and charging a fee for it. Instead, and as I outlined in the post I linked to above, it first met a basic consumer need to generate traffic and then leveraged that traffic to meet a business need. The awesomeness is in the combination.

Wow, this is a Eureka moment – for me at least; since we don’t have a choice anyway, let’s leave Google to continue to dominate advertising and let’s focus instead on Conversion as the next big opportunity. Why didn’t I think of this before or more to the point why aren’t more start-ups operating in this space?

Perhaps in my next post, I will look at how Facebook or Twitter might take on the conversion problem. I already feel an idea coming on.