Monday, May 01, 2006

How to bring traffic to your site - Part 7

Working with Free traffic tools

Tell-a-friend forms are a perfect example of viral marketing. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it harnesses the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.

Viral marketing is sometimes used to describe some sorts of Internet-based stealth marketing campaigns, including the use of blogs, seemingly amateur web sites, and other forms of astroturfing to create word of mouth for a new product or service. Often, the ultimate goal of viral marketing campaigns is to generate media coverage via "offbeat" stories worth many times more than the campaigning company's advertising budget.

Refer-A-friend is a “tell-a-friend” form that you can install on your web site within minutes.
The only technical knowledge required is the ability to copy and paste a small piece of code into your web pages. Although you put the same piece of code on every page, visitors can effortlessly refer a specific page from deep within your web site because of page-sensing technology.

Word of mouth is still an advertiser's best friend - both offline and online. With it, your visitors can recommend your web site directly to their colleagues' inboxes.

Gain a deeper insight into your web site's performance

Refer-A-Buddy tracks the number of times your web site visitors make a referral and also which pages are referred. These statistics tell you something that even the most expensive and sophisticated web site logs and trackers cannot give you. That is to say they measure a real human interaction with your web site. If someone decides to 'tell a friend' about what they have found at one of your web pages, then you can be sure they were pretty fired up and enthusiastic about it.

At last - double strength email validation to help you and your web site visitors

Email addresses are often long and complicated and most people are not expert typists. Our research shows that without validation, as many as 40% of email addresses are entered incorrectly or are invalid. So any professional web application that asks a user for an email address will try to check that the email address is 'well formed.' A good referral software does this of course - but also goes one important step further and verifies that the web server referenced in the email address both exists and is up and running. This works for your visitors as an intelligent assistant to help them address their referral correctly and, if you are using the opt-in email check box, it makes it more likely that you will receive good quality email addresses for your database.

Now you can benefit from the power of viral marketing

Without a doubt, old-fashioned 'word of mouth' is one of the most powerful ways to publicize anything. So if a visitor to your web site likes what he/she sees, why not offer him/her a simple and attractive way to spread the word? After all, put yourself in his/her position.

Say you want to tell a friend about a web page you have seen. You don’t need to remember the URL, the web page address. You don’t need to get on the phone and start spelling out the URL. And you won’t even have to try to type out the URL in an email. A sample code of a 'tell a friend service' solves this problem by making it a simple matter for a visitor to pass on their recommendation, and consequently, they are more likely to do it. Not only that, but this web tool makes sure they make the recommendation error-free. The software knows the full and precise URL of your web page and places it as a clickable link into the recommendation email.

This can make a lot of hits to your website especially if you have been patient about making your daily enhancements on your website. This is another easy way to gain more people's trust, as these are often satisfied customers who want to share their experiences. Adding this feature will likely result in more traffic, resulting in additional sales.

As a webmaster resource, a good referral software is a perfect way to exploit a new kind of marketing, which adds smooth, professional functionality to your web design and at the same time is an invaluable web tool for driving traffic to your web site through the power of viral marketing.
 


About the author::

Peter Dobler is a 20+ year veteran in the IT business. He is an active Real Estate Investor and a successful Internet business owner. Collect more free software and bonus content for your own web site at http://www.online-business-idea.com

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