The key to the success of e-commerce is in the combination of the power of viral marketing, permission marketing and one to one marketing.

Have you ever heard of Amazon.com, Bluemountain Cards, or Hotmail? Of course you have! Why? Because the all use varying degrees of the above mentioned marketing techniques. In particular, they use viral marketing.

How can you use viral marketing?

With referral scripts!

First of all, you need to make sure that your ezine has a referral, 'Tell a Friend' link in each and every issue. You can say something like:

"If you enjoy our newsletter a think a friend might also benefit from it, please click here."

or

"Please help us share our message with others by telling a friend. It's easy, just click here."

The 'click here' should be a hyper link to a web page with your referral script. You can find free referral scripts on various sites such as http://www.bignosebird.com or http://www.hotscripts.com. I use an amazing script that I had put together by a programmer. It cost me $1,600 but you can use it for free and make money while doing so -- no kidding. It is easy to implement. You can see how it works by visiting http://www.listopt.com and clicking on the 'Tell a Friend' link. If you want to use it too, go to: http://listopt.com/affiliate_taf.html

There are other third party referral services out there such as http://www.recommend-it.com that are VERY easy to use and offer your readers incentives of $10,000 to tell a friend. The down side is that it is not as professional looking when you use a third party.

So get out there and set up a tell-a-friend script now and get those word of mouth referrals via one of the best viral marketing techniques available.

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About The Author

Glen Hopkins is the director of ListOpt Publications Inc. If you're looking to build your newsletter subscriber base quickly, easily and inexpensively, visit Glen at: http://www.listopt.com and learn what hundreds of other publishers are saying about ListOpt's amazing List Builder service.