Buttons that Recommend Your Site

This week, a friend forwarded me an Email she received touting the marketing benefits of adding a Send-A-Friend button on a Web site.

A Send-A-Friend button is known by different names depending on that site that makes the tool available, names such as “Tell a Friend” or “Refer this Site.” The button allows a Web visitor to contact another person via Email, directly from your site, to share knowledge about your products and services or, at the least, your site’s existence. As a default, I’ll call this a site recommendation button.

Newsletters I’ve received in the past have recommended promoting with this icon, and every one of those recommenders, including the one sent by my friend, neglect to provide a link to at least one company that makes the button available.

Why recommend something without providing a source? I agree that small and solo business owners should do their own research to find Web resources and tools. However, providing one link won’t hurt. In fact, it makes you, the person who is recommending a marketing tool, look like you know what you’re talking about.

I decided to research Send-A-Friend buttons to learn how easy or difficult it is to find one. I admit that it wasn’t easy. In fact, the first one I found included two sets of HTML code. I consider myself a good amateur, a fearless person who will add and delete code at will to achieve the best results. These instructions, however, were unintelligible.

Then I remembered my membership with Bravenet.com. Bravenet makes promotional tools available for Web sites and provides a host of other products. There’s a list of available tools on the home page, and one of those tools is called Tell-A-Friend.

I’m not sure if you must sign up for a free subscription/membership to read more about Tell-A-Friend, but try it for yourself. Otherwise, subscribing to Bravenet is a requirement for access to the HTML code.

This tool was quick and easy for me to add to one of my sites, and I’ll soon apply it to others. I did play with the coding a bit, because when I added the button, two buttons appeared. One was the Tell-A-Friend button, and the other promoted Bravenet (”free” comes at a price). If you know what you’re doing, you can also edit the code. But be careful. Some of the editing disables the button’s function.

A subscription to Bravenet’s premium membership will remove all of the advertising within the Tell-A-Friend button. You’ll see the advertising when you test the button as you place it on your site.

Here’s where I’m testing a Tell-A-Friend button. It’s in the right column at the top.

Look in your Web host’s tools section to see if they make this button available. I checked my Web host; they don’t.

Now you know where to find a site recommendation button.

Technorati Tags: small business marketing, solo business marketing, Tell A Friend, Send A Friend, Refer This Site, Bravenet.com, Web tools, marketing, promotion