Site Promotion Information |
Time to Tell A Friend
The internet has the capacity, sometimes, to divorce not just our minds from our bodies and siphon us into cyberspace but also our common sense. When it comes to business models the internet seems to have managed to make us forget everything we knew in the Real World (RL for the acronym lovers) and slow down the length of time it takes us to re-learn it. How else can we explain the fact that the number one selling tool in the universe is so underused on the internet that hardly anyone remembers to implement it. All right, I've played games long enough, time to get real and tackle exactly what I'm talking about. In the real world before you change your mobile phone, splash out for that flat-screen plasma TV or set out to test-drive the latest muscle-car at your local dealer you first discuss it with your friends. That's because you're the product of an evolutionary process that has conditioned us, as a species, to pool our resources in order to reach a decision that is far more informed than anything we could have managed on our own. More brains than one Left alone, on an island, without even a Man Friday to talk to our store of knowledge and our ability to make informed judgements would soon deteriorate to the point where the quality of our decisions would jeopardise our chances of survival. The net is no different. We see a product that's hot, a web page we like or a news item that's topical and our immediate reaction is to tell a friend (or several). With the internet and email our telling a friend becomes both immediate and personalised. Except that when we're in full flow, buried in reading the text on a page, checking out the stats on a sports car or weighing up the merits of a particular product we're loathe to leave the page in order to load up our email programme and spend time firing-off a message or two. Savvy website designers who understand this have responded with the 'Tell A Friend' facility, a nifty applet that, at a click, allows you to tell your friend or friends what you've found on the net. That way you and I, as sophisticated consumers, carry on with our online activity and still engage in the critical knowledge-sharing interaction that's a characteristic of our species. This is a classic win-win scenario. We do our bit. Website owners get to benefit by recommendations and fresh traffic and our friends find out about websites they probably wouldn't have come across as quickly (if at all). In website design parlance a 'Tell A Friend' facility is 'empowerment'. It's allowing the surfer to increase their interaction with the website and maximise their return from its use. Not as easy as it looks Of course, had all this common-sense behaviour really been as common as that I would not have written this article and, in all probability, you would not be reading it. I have no idea why website owners do not ask for it to be implemented more frequently, but I do know that when they do they don't always get it right. Remember the reason we didn't use our email client to send a message to our friends in the first place is because by the time we find what we want on the net and launch ourselves into the web pages we're in too deep to readily want to interrupt what we're doing and send a message to anyone. There are two types of 'Tell A Friend' facility you can use. The first takes you to another page where you can type in your friend's email address, your own and (usually) a brief message. The second type allows you to do all this, prompts you for a message right from the page you're surfing. It is the clever use of the second type implemented by web design experts, PQL (http://www.pqlwebsolutions.co.uk/), that proved its mettle when it allowed the pages it appeared on at Cool Publications, an internet publisher website, to increase their traffic load by over 300%. When analysing why this happened at the Cool Publications monthly traffic stats meeting it became apparent that while in the past we'd relied on valuable word-of-mouth publicity to spread through the digital equivalent of more traditional means (i. e. fire-up your email and send off a message much as you would have picked up the phone when you found a spare moment and talked to your friends about what you'd found), in this case we'd actually 'prompted' the surfer to tell their friends and, what's more, made it possible for this to happen without ever leaving the page. "Breaking the flow of concentration of surfers is never a desirable thing to do and neither should you take them off your website in order to have them send a message to a friend. The same one-click ease of use that got them there can conspire to take them somewhere else," says Lead Designer, Paul Beardsell at PQL. "Taking advantage of word-of-mouth publicity is essential to your business but it should never happen at the expense of a sale." So, if you have a page on your website (or a product) which you think it'd set the world alight and surfers would like to share with their friends, go ahead and implement the code to make this possible. As long as you remember that empowerment also means ease of use and additional sales, and all this should work, seamlessly together. David Amerland is the Projects Editor at Cool Publications, an internet publishing company that has revolutionised web marketing and publicity. Prior to that he reported for The European, worked in PR for a national sports corporation and was the lead reporter for Your Money, Savings and Investments magazine.
MORE RESOURCES: Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting |
RELATED ARTICLES
Internet Directory Submission, Sure Way To Link Popularity Most website owners fail to differentiate between a directory and search engine, failure to do so has resulted in failure to harness the powers of Internet directory effectively.Search engine uses the spiders - (an automated software program) to locate and collect data from web pages for inclusion in a search engine's database and to follow links to find new pages on the World Wide Web. Seecrets on Website Promotion: Results of Open Source Marketing Plan after 2 Months This author's open-source marketing plan, as announced on June 29, 2005, is mainly for small and medium-sized businesses. By keeping it simple, this author hoped it can be useful to businesses with a limited budget, can get "more bang for the buck". 11 Awesome Ways To Attract More Orders 1. Create a free ebook directory on a specific topic at your web site. 3 Reasons Your Website Might Fail To Attract Enough Customers Virtually all website owners concentrate their efforts and energy into getting more visitors. With business owners this effort is spent on getting more and more new customers. Internet Marketing and Getting Your Site Noticed You may have created and established the best Web site in the world, however if the world does not know it is there, it will not do your business any good. As a result, knowing how to market your site and getting your site noticed is incredibly important to the success of your business and something you will want to concentrate your efforts on. SEO - How Fast Do You Want To Get To The Top? Search engine optimization by some is considered a science and by others is a game. Recently working on many sites and promoting them for over six months now has made me realize some of the basic techniques. Streamline Your Training Costs with Streaming Media Streaming Media?now a well accepted Internet technology. Yet streaming is still not being widely utilized by members of corporate training staffs. 3 Steps To Increasing Your Web Traffic For Free You own a website and you want more traffic. More traffic will lead to more sales and more ad revenue. Search Engine Friendly Ways to Build Link Popularity Acquiring relevant backlinks to your website is one of the most important parts of any Search Engine Optimization campaign. The search engine's and especially Google value backlinks to your website as an indicator of your website's importance. 5 Successful Tips For Marketing Your Website This could be the most amazing article to ever be released as you read this please keep in mind that the tips I am about to share with you are from my experience with my own successful website HaileysComet Weekly Ezine. (1)List Building: One of the most POWERFUL ways to promote any website is to have your own list to promote with. Promote Your Site through Niche Directories Maybe you are a Doctor or a lawyer. You've built an excellent web site that looks good, has the potential to make huge sales and is well optimised for the search engines. Promotion Techniques Dont Have To Be A Hassle Are you tired of writing countless eMails to other webmasters asking for a link exchange with your new website just to see them being deleted by a spam filter or just ignored? Or don't you want to go through many manual directory submissions again just to get some links and therefore potential visitors to your homepage? Then one of the many different programs that automate or simplify the process of building links to your site might be what you are looking for. However, since those services are available in many different kinds of flavor and some of them might even damage your sites ranking instead of helping it, this article will now take a deeper look at some of the more important programs to help you decide which could help your websites best. Promote Your Website: Search Tools Many companies after spending a substantial amount of money on the development of their websites assume that once the website is published on the Internet, people will flock onto it and, therefore, do not take website promotion as seriously as the development part of it. Today, with millions of websites around, no matter how great your website is, if you don't promote it effectively, you will not get the visibility that your site deserves. The Basics Of Free Web Site Promotion It's easy to forget the fundamental components of Web site promotion. Winding back the clock to the days when many Webmasters couldn't afford prolonged advertising campaigns, the majority of people starting out with a new Web site were forced to discover the art of free Web site promotion. Easy Content Building for the Lazy Webmaster Free content builder. Articles are the best way to add free content to your site. The Quest In Advertising Your Website Website advertising, the unending quest of every website owner. And Free is a word I work towards. Promoting Your Site Off-Line The internet is a wonderful source of information and full of people that could be your customer. But there are many people that you would never meet online. Types of Keywords Keyword can be classified into three categories :-Single word Keyword-Multiple word Keyword-Keywords based on ThemeKeyword(s) are basic raw material used in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Keyword selection or Keyword Research as it is called technically, where in we use special tools to find out a list of Keywords (search terms) searched by targeted audience, is one of the most important step in SEO. Ten Free Ways To Promote Your Website Often, website owners would like to promote their new business but are strapped for cash. What a dilemma! How to market your product if the public doesn't know your website exist? The odds are you will lack the flow of traffic to survive in the vast ocean called the World Wide Web. How to Write Great Testimonials and Why it Can Increase Your Profits Incredibly! Everyone likes to read or get a referral about something they are considering buying. It helps overcome that fear of mistrust. |
home | site map | contact us |