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February 2002

Website Technique
Recommend Forms
by Tom Antion

There is not much doubt in any marketing circles that third party endorsements from credible people are more powerful than all of your self-generated pronouncements of greatness.

You can make it easier to stimulate these third party endorsements by installing recommend forms on your website and suggesting that visitors use them.

These forms can be used to recommend any of your products or services.

PROMOTE YOUR EZINE
I use a recommend CGI script to get people to promote my free Ezine "Great Speaking." A CGI script is a piece of computer programming installed on your website server computer. (Unless you are pretty savvy technically, you wouldn't install this yourself.) When someone fills in the form and hits the "submit" button a complex series of events is kicked off behind the scenes. That gets your marketing done automatically.

Here's how my "Great Speaking" recommend form works:

When you visit http://www.antion.com/recommend.html you put your name and email address in the recommend form. You then put in the name and email address of your friend along with a personalized massage to your friend. When you hit the submit button several things happen.

1. Your personalized recommendation goes via email to your friend along with a customizable message from me and subscribe instructions for "Great Speaking" ezine.

2. You can get an optional copy of what was sent to your friend sent back to you via email.

3. I get notice via email that someone recommended "Great Speaking" and a copy of what they said.

4. The form pops back up with a thank you note from me to you along with a suggestion to recommend "Great Speaking" to more of your friends and colleagues. The form keeps popping up until you get tired of it or run out of friends.

This is all automated. I had this installed several years ago for a very small amount of money (about $85.00) and it's been working flawlessly ever since.

My record so far is 15 recommendations from one person. I also suggest to the person recommending that they use this as a way to stay in touch with clients because it's a nice, quick, and inexpensive way to let them know you are thinking of them.

This script has resulted in thousands of new subscribers to "Great Speaking."

Many people ask me if I can email to the persons that were recommended to "Great Speaking." The answer is NO! That would be spam email because I have no relationship with these people. I realize that some people may risk it and claim they had a relationship through the recommender. But I say it's just too risky that someone will complain.

RECOMMEND YOUR WEBSITE
The same form could be used to recommend your website or free e-book or whatever you want. 

I got this script from a good old boy at http://www.willmaster.com . The basic script is actually free if you can install it yourself. I got the $50.00 version that has the recurring pop up feature, i.e., it keeps popping back up for more recommends until the recommender quits. I also paid the creator of the script $35.00 to install it on my web server.

Before you dive into a project like this, read about whatever script you pick to see the server requirements needed for it to work. Then call your web host to see if they are using what your script requires.

For instance I think my script needed to be hosted on a UNIX server ( I say I think, because I don't know anything about that stuff and don't want to) and it required CGI BIN access (same thing. I don't know what this means and don't care). All I did was call the web host and ask, "Do you use a UNIX  server and do you allow CGI Bin access?
They said yes. I called Bill back and sent him a check and the passwords. He installed the script and tested it and sent me instructions on how to change / customize the sign up message.

I haven't had to fool with it since..

I recently looked into recommend forms that use different types of programming like ASP, PHP and other acronyms I don't understand. I asked top search engine expert, John Heard, if he thought these forms would hurt my search engine positioning and he said no. So feel free to use any form you like.

You can find many of them at http://www.willmaster.com or type "recommend forms" with quotation marks around the words into any major search engine.

If you would like a form like this that takes only about 2 minutes to set up http://www.kickstartcart.com  has it's own module included with it's other advanced marketing features. Get a 30 day free trial by clicking the link above.

For my "Great Speaking" ezine I put the following text in each issue:

Please recommend this E-Zine to anyone you know that is interested in being a better presenter, or who may want to make money speaking and training. (It's a good way to stay in touch with client's too.) You don't even have to mail them an article. http://www.antion.com/recommend.html 

For http://www.GreatInternetMarketing.com  I simply put a link with text: Click here to recommend this site to a friend which is hyperlinked to the Kick Start Cart automatic recommend form http://www.kickstartcart.com/app/tellafriend.asp?MerchantID=16070

Make it easy for people to recommend your products and services and you'll tap the power of the third party endorsement.


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