Friday, November 14, 2008

How to Use a Tell A Friend Script to Create Traffic

Traffic is what a website needs to be successful. It is traffic that can provide the income a website needs to sustain itself. And if it were a business oriented website, you surely are going to achieve the sales quota for the day to earn a good amount of money. While setting up a website seems easy, driving traffic to it is actually the biggest problem of all.

But of course, for every problem, there is always a solution. To solve the problem associated with a slow day on your website is the tell-a-friend script. While the script won't necessarily give you the spike of traffic you want in a day; it could certainly double your traffic at any point in time. The tell-a-friend script works by giving your visitors the means to send a picture, a part of the content you have on your site, or simply an invitation to check out what you have up to their circle of friends.
The script capitalizes on the word of mouth principle. If one person finds your website helpful, he most probably will share it with others. And if you have a fully functional tell-a-friend script; he or she need not log on to his mail client or instant messaging service.

All he has to do is to use the link on your site that says 'email this to a friend' or 'invite a friend' and he will be redirected to a page wherein they can instantly send their personal message or a canned message to their friends. They'll only need to supply the recipient's email address and it is all done.

The tell-a-friend script can actually work for you. People inviting their friends to your site proposes to be a better marketing strategy than sending massive spam mails to people you don't know. Not only that spamming is considered is illegal, you are also going to give your website a bad impression to the very people you want to visit.

To make the script work for you, try to place it at the end of every content article you place on your site. Let your visitors freely surf everything you have placed on your website, read all information-rich articles, and browse through the pictures and images you have posted. Just make sure that the link to send the content to their friends are positioned optimally on every page so they can freely do so with every chance they get.

If people receive an email from somebody they know, they are more likely to heed the invitation. Mail from people they trust have higher chances of being read rather than the emails from a site or a person they haven't heard of.

It is very important that the tell-a-friend script you use is placing the name of the friend who recommends your site right on the subject part of the email. If their friend's name is not shown, they are more than likely going to ignore the message and treat it as spam. You don't want that to happen, so you have to make sure that the person's real name, if possible, is showing at all times.

Other than that, you can also store the email address you collect for future contacts. With the tell-a-friend script, you can make a database full of email addresses of real people.

You are not supposed to use these email address for marketing purposes, though. Part of your privacy policy is to use only the email addresses you have acquired for the actual purpose intended. Don't send unsolicited emails to those addresses or sell them to other people, as doing that is also considered as spam and that is punishable by law.

The simple tell-a-friend script could give you better mileage on your website. You can obtain most of these scripts for free. Just make sure that you get them from reliable sources to be sure that you're not creating security threats for your site.

However, you can also have them customized by a seasoned programmer. You might need to pay them for their services, though. But then again, it is only a one-time deal. It's a good investment because you will be able to maximize your visitors once you have the script up and running.

When it comes to generating visitors, you should do everything necessary to make your site successful, as far as unique traffic is concerned. And the tell-a-friend script is definitely something that you can use to make things happen for you and your website.

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