Viral Marketing and the Tell-a-Friend Form

If you own a web business, chances are that you use viral marketing to increase traffic to your website. If not, then you should install one into your website. Also known as viral advertising, viral marketing is a marketing strategy that employs word-of-mouth to market a website and/or business from one person to another. The main advantages of using this marketing strategy are that they are easy to set up, cost-effective to operate, and can spread awareness of the target business/website very rapidly. Also, viral marketing can also be very simple to use, as exhibited by simple web gadgets such as the tell-a-friend form.

One easy yet effective way to market your online business virally is to incorporate a “tell-a-friend” form onto your site. This online form is actually a computer script embedded onto the website that enables users to “tell a friend” or refer the site to their contacts in e-mail. Visitors of the simply have to fill up the form with the necessary details (name, e-mail address, personal message etc.). One the Send button on the bottom of the form is clicked the script will then generate an e-mail using the information provided by the user, and sends it to the target recipients.

With the tell-a-friend form, online businesses, affiliate marketers, and even bloggers can virally market their websites easily. These forms are available in either HTML or PHP format, and can be downloaded for free on the web. Several “pro” versions of the form, however, can only be acquired for a small fee and have additional features that basic tell-a-friend forms do not have such as e-mail client integration and monitoring capabilities.