Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Tell A Friend

The Tell A Friend site (www.bravenet.com/webtools/announce/index.php) is shown in Figure 22-9.

Figure 22-9. Tell A Friend’s referral form helps bring new visitors to your Web site.

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You see billions and billions, if not absolute zillions, of Web sites that display a Recommend This Site to a Friend link. You have good reason to include a link like this one on your site because a personal recommendation is a powerful sales tool. If people hear from someone they trust about a Web site that they ought to look at, they’re much more inclined to check it out. With any other method, you have to ask people to rely on the word of strangers or maybe even just a search engine.

Even if you’re not involved in e-commerce, you still want to attract quality visitors. And you still get more of the right people visiting your site if you help your current visitors tell their friends how much they like it. One of the easiest ways to do so is to use the free Tell A Friend service. Just go to www.bravenet.com/webtools/announce/index.php.

One of the benefits of the Tell A Friend service is that it offers prizes, which is an extra incentive for people to make a recommendation. One of the drawbacks is that the service is trying to get people to sign up for its newsletter, but even that has a silver lining. If people do sign up, Tell A Friend pays you as an affiliate. ...