Viral Inviter

The Tell-A-Friend approach to letting lots of people know about your website finally works with the help of Viral Inviter, a script that markets your site Facebook style.

In the old days, people would put these "Tell-A-Friend" boxes at the bottom of their web pages. It will go around the lines of: "Like this site? Please tell your friends..."

You'll then see a table containing 5 to 10 rows where you can manually type in the names and email addresses of your friends, your own name and email (so that your friends know the message is coming from you), click on the Send button, and a pre-written message gets sent to those 5 to 10 people.

It did not work well in the past because:

• It takes too much time to type in a bunch of email addresses.


• Some folks would type in fake email addresses.

Viral Inviter, on the other hand, succeeds because it copies the success of FaceBook.

Instead of requiring people to type in a bunch of email addresses, it taps directly into the email address books and list of contacts of people in Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and 30 other services. In other words, your visitors can now easily invite their ENTIRE list of contacts to visit your web site.

Yep, no more manual typing of 5 to 10 email addresses. It is now click-easy for people to spread the word about your web site. And the great thing about it is, people will receive news about your web site from people they trust: their friends and email contacts.

There are some issues that need to be resolved, though:

1. Are people willing to type in their email passwords while they're on your webpage?


2. Is the website hosting the Viral Inviter script secure?


3. How will the email services such as GMail and Yahoo react once the Viral Inviter script makes use of the data stored in the Contacts area?

These are things that still need to be tested. While other people have gotten at least 10,000 new visitors as a result of this script, and some have even had to install a separate email server to handle the flood of traffic, the results may be different in your site.

Yet if your visitor likes your site enough to recommend it to their friends, there's a pretty good chance those friends will also like your site, right? Now do you see why FaceBook is hugely popular and successful? Just be aware of the potential security issues listed above, okay?

Anyway, if you're curious, then check out Norman Fellman's Viral Inviter today, and let thousands of people know about your web site in just a few clicks.

[ First posted on 06/29/2008 by Manuel Viloria ]