A Look at 2 Leading Tell-a-friend Viral Marketing Software

If you have been around in the internet marketing world long enough you probably have heard of Mike Filsaime's Viral Friends Generator. What it does is basically bribe the visitors to tell their friends about the site. In the early days, the interface of the VFG is just a few simple text boxes where visitors can type in their friend's email addresses plus a simple submit button. This creates a win-win situation for both the site owner and the visitors. The site owner gets more traffic, the visitors get a free gift (something of value), everyone happy. However, things usually don't turn out the way we plan; often time the site owners run into a problem where visitors do not type in valid email addresses so visitors get free gift but site owners get nothing.

There is also unsettled discussion on where is the best place to put the tell-a-friend page, after opt-in? after sign up? after log out? and the list goes on and on. In the early days, the tell-a-friend script doesn't give you much flexibility on location of the tell-a-friend page plus the restriction for the kind of website that the tell-a-friend script can be used with.

Those days you only see marketing sites use this kind of tool and most of the time you will find tell-a-friend script after opt-in pages or sign up pages. So, folks in the internet marketing niche kind of got used to it after a while so the tell-a-friend script later became "invisible" to the visitors.

Recently, web 2.0 has been very big. One social site started to implement similar idea to the tell-a-friend script where members are given a chance to invite their friends to come join the social site. And here is the trick, users can just login to their email accounts and invites friends on their contact list through simple web interface. And now almost all of the social network sites use the same trick. The "trick" is responsible for the viral growth of those social network sites.
So now, the tell-a-friend script follows the social network industry. Nowadays, the email contacts importer is a basic requirement for every tell-a-friend script on the market, it comes down to the question of how many email clients does the script support. Often time in the promotion material will say something like "grow your site like Myspace and Facebook" but we all know that this kind of statement is a cliche.