Does your website offer visitors a quick and easy way to recommend it to a friend? If not, you're missing out on a potential gold mine of free traffic.
The benefits:
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:
Resources page at http://www.busymarketing.com/links.shtml for a website with instructions on how to use the script.
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.
About The Author
Would you like to see more articles like this? Dawn Gray writes Busy Marketing Tips! Subscribe today by emailing subscribe@busymarketing.com and get a free Search Engine Tips screensaver.