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How to Get Your Visitors To "Tell A Friend"

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:

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.

About the author: Dawn Gray writes Busy Marketing Tips! Subscribe today by emailing subscribe@busymarketing.com and get free Search Engine Tips. Busy Marketing dawn@busymarketing.com

Author: Dawn Gray

 

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Being a webmaster is a much more important job than most companies would dare admit. Webmasters are responsible for the company web presence on every level, from the website copy to the web and email server administration. Additionally, webmasters are often tasked even more duties that should be considered unrelated responsibilities for the position of webmaster. These extra duties often will include online as well as offline promotion and marketing, search optimization, advertising, application programming, graphic design and/or brand management. The role of the webmaster has grown over the years and webmasters need to grow with the company's expectations or the website will not succeed. For instance, it is easy to get banned from the search engines for not knowing the correct methods to use to optimize a website for a better results ranking from the search engines for any particular search phrase.

This is why Webmastery is here, not just to offer direction and assist webmasters, but to do so masterfully, as you expect of yourself, or as your company expects out of you.
 

Since I am an American and know only American English and SEO methods, I specialize in American Webmastery. Hence the domain name, Webmastery.US.
 

However, please note that often both sides of the coin are presented here. Some webmasters swear by Linux and we offer articles by such authors to give insight to their creativity. Others are die-hard Microsoft software fans and use Windows based servers. Despite the bias, each system has its own advantages, and such articles are reprinted here for their positive contribution to those platforms, not to enforce their bias. It is we that have to make the final analysis.
 

This difference is even more apparent when I am showcasing and promoting white hat SEO (search engine optimization) and a black hat SEO article is published here, which method if followed could get a website banned from the search engines. The reason I allow it a small platform is to showcase its apparent and obvious idiocy in contrast to white hat SEO techniques. And as I cannot edit these articles in order to correct them, I let their illogicality and stupidity stand on their own for a time without any edits. But in case their spaminess is not apparent, I often do not let such articles stand long.
 

 

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