The Little Black Book of Online Business: 1001 Insider Resources Every Business Owner Needs

Chapter 61. Referral Marketing Tools

The most effective form of advertising has always been word of mouth—someone is much more likely to purchase your product if it's been recommended by a friend. Internet technology has greatly increased the efficiency of referral marketing—people simply fill out an online form and click Send.

Not only that, but you can easily track the success of your referral marketing campaigns to see how many people have referred their friends, how many friends they referred, and even how many of those friends actually visited your site.

You can use a hosted service to implement a tell-a-friend function on your site:

http://www.supertaf.com/

http://www.tellafriendking.com/

http://www.tafmaster.com/

Or you could install software on your server. Before you do this, though, it's a good idea to check with your hosting company.

Since the software sends out e-mails from your server, there is the potential for abuse by your visitors: They could enter random e-mail addresses rather than e-mail addresses of their friends, and any resulting spam complaints would be traced back to your site. I haven't seen this happen, but it's always a possibility.

That being said, here are some server-based software solutions:

http://www.tafpro.com/ (Disclosure: I own this site.)

http://willmaster.com/master/recommend

http://www.viralfriendgenerator.com/

http://www.viralinviter.com/

This last one is one of the most recent tell-a-friend applications to come on the market, and it deserves ...