By Mikal E. Belicove|For Entrepreneur.com|May 24, 2011

Few activities are more engaging than a well-designed game. By their nature, games encourage and facilitate exploration of virtual space and reward players when they perform tasks, achieve goals or acquire skills. When you think about it, this is precisely what your business needs to do for your customers. By encouraging your website visitors to engage in certain activities and rewarding them for doing so, you transform the conversion process into something more akin to an interactive game.

Think of it as rewarding customers for swiping a credit or debit card, staying at a particular hotel or flying a certain airline. In exchange for engaging via your website, you reward current and prospective customers with points for discounts, badges that signify status and so on. You may even have a leaderboard where customers can compete against one another to win prizes.

When you apply simple game theory to your website, visitors earn rewards for many of the things you want them to do, such as signing up for an e-newsletter, participating in an online demo, downloading a white paper, commenting on a blog post and liking your Facebook page.

The good news is that you don’t have to…

Continue reading Five New Tools to Help You Add a Game to Your Website