Viral Marketing Tip: Tell a Friend Website Script

As more and more people try to earn a living on the Web, the competition for the attention of those surfing the Web becomes more intense. There are constantly new methods of garnering traffic being developed. Almost all of these methods work, but many are inefficient and produce results that are less than the efforts put into the web traffic projects. The most successful methods for small business owners are those based on the concept of viral marketing. This article is about the benefits of using one of the most proven viral marketing tools, tell a friend scripts.

Viral marketing is the use of peoples' tendencies across all cultures to share things they find particularly interesting. The only costs of viral marketing are usually in terms of time spent, as people willingly do the advertising and promotion for you. The goal of the Internet viral marketer is to come up with novel entertainment ideas that can be delivered electronically, along with advertisements or positive brand recognition messages. Viral marketing on the Internet has tremendous power in that an idea can be delivered to one person and, if it is truly unique and interesting, suddenly there are millions of people are passing it around and talking about what they saw. It is not uncommon for a Web page with a good viral marketing idea from a single individual to be one of the most visited pages on the Internet within weeks of its launch. However, it is uncommon to come up with unique viral marketing ideas. This is the challenge.

The good news is that you can use techniques learned from viral marketing to improve all of your pages, even if they are not truly unique and particularly interesting pages. As long as they appeal to a niche or specific group of people, you can benefit from viral marketing. This is where tell a friend scripts come into play. A tell a friend script is simply some code ranging from a little snippet of code you paste into your pages to a full-fledged contact management script that keeps statistics and e-mail lists. You have probably seen tell a friend script buttons or email to a friend buttons on news sites.

All there is to using tell a friend scripts is you place the script on any pages with somewhat unique content that you think a person may want to share with others. They click on the button and input the email address of a friend with which they want to share the content. Often they are allowed to write a little personalized message to go with the email. Suddenly you have generated new site traffic and sales leads. Most sales people in the offline world would do about anything to have access to such high-quality sales lead referrals. Since the email comes from someone they know, you don't get harassed for spamming and you have a much lower chance of your email going to the "bulk" or "spam" folder on the receiver's computer.

Remember that the more interesting and unique the content is, the more people will use your tell a friend scripts. A general rule of thumb is that if you post a news story or RSS feed, post a media clip, have an online game available, post unique content, or have any other for of media available, you should take advantage of tell a friend scripts. It is also possible with well-branded media you've created to allow the media to be attached to the emails and sent around the Internet. This kind of viral marketing will spread even faster than Web site content, but you lose control of the content and some people may alter it.

If you are interested in putting tell a friend scripts into your pages, I have really good news for you. There are dozens of free tell a friend scripts available for free commercial use on your site. You can simply go searching for tell a friend scripts. Then follow the directions and install the tell a friend scripts into your pages. Feel free to try out several tell a friend scripts to get the one that works the best for you and your site.

Another benefit of using tell a friend scripts is that you'll be able to get a better grip on what content your site visitors really like and what content they find ordinary. Many people overlook that tell a friend scripts may be the most useful customer feedback tools. The more you use these scripts, the better you'll get at producing unique and entertaining content for your users. In other words, the more you use tell a friend scripts, the better you will get at viral marketing.