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How to Get Your Visitors To "Tell A Friend"

by Dawn Gray    

The benefits:

1. Automated website promotion. You set up the program and your visitors do the work of promoting your website for you.

2. You receive higher quality visitors. Your visitors will refer people *really interested* in your products or services. These people will be more likely to subscribe to your newsletter, request your free reports, and ultimately BUY YOUR PRODUCTS!

3. Nobody will every be insulted or upset by this promotion technique (as long as you make it clear that the message comes from their friend). People can only participate if they visit your website, and email will only be sent by people the recipient knows.

Just asking your visitors to recommend your website isn't enough. You need to make it easy. Offer a form on your website your visitors can fill out to recommend it to a friend. Either put the form on every page of your website, put it in a pop-up window, or link to it on every page.

There are many ways to do it:

1. Javascript. See the Javascript resources on my Webmaster Resources page at http://www.busymarketing.com/links.shtml for a website with instructions on how to use the script.

2. CGI. I really like Birdcast at http://www.bignosebird.com - it's what I use on my website. You can find more options on my Webmaster Resources page.

3. A service. Many remotely-hosted scripts are available.

The most popular is Recommend-It at http://www.recommendit.com (which offers a contest as an incentive and allows you to add recommendation links to the email you send out). There is also a free program called Let 'Em Know at http://www.letemknow.com which allows you to run your own contest for participants and probably offers more statistics. Either can be set up in 5 minutes or less.

Javascript and CGI scripts have the benefit of being completely under your control. You can customize them to work on your website and decide if and how visitors are notified about the origin of your script.

Services are easier to set up, but have to make a living somehow and may use advertising or big, tacky buttons with their name and/or logo in order to do so.

Don't delay! Set up a Tell-A-Friend system on your website to watch the number and quality of your visitors improve without raising a finger.