Electronic Referrals

You might be familiar with Recommend-It! at http://recommend-it.com It's a great service and deserves all the kudos it gets. I was considering using it on my site but a few things held me back:

* The user would have to leave my site to make the recommendation, which I'm kinda paranoid about -- I don't like to let people escape too easily! Also, the fact that it needs one extra button click to take the user to the Recommend-It site reduces the chance of people using it. One extra button click may not sound like much, but it reduces the response dramatically.

* I wasn't keen on all the extra advertising and the 'From' address - rec-bot@recommend-it.com - in the referral message. I thought it would be better for the message to look like it had come directly from a person.

* The webmaster doesn't get the names and addresses of either the person making the referral or the recipients. Remember, qualified email addresses = marketing power.

* It's limited to three referrals.

So, I decided to make one myself. You can see it in action at the bottom of http://deadlock.com/promote/

The advantages of my system are:

* The form fields are right there on the page, ready to be filled.

* The results page prompts the user for six more referrals, and it keeps coming back for more!

* The referral message is written by me but it's heavily personalized with both the sender's and the recipient's names. The advantages are: a) less effort for the user, so they can concentrate on writing names and addresses and b) my text sells the site more strongly than a message written by the sender.

* No advertising, and all addresses point to the sender. The email looks exactly as it would if the user had sent it directly.

* I (the webmaster) get lists of all the names and addresses so I can follow up if I like.

I've had it for a few weeks now, and my traffic increased by 50% for a while (and I had plenty to start with), now it's settled down at about 35% extra from what I used to get. That's 35% extra, permanently, no search engine tricks required. Eve agrees:

http://deadlock.com/promote/ "...I am receiving well over a 100 referrers a day... my e-mail system is getting overloaded... how do I stop the webmaster e-mail?"

I've noticed that people often take up my invitation to "fill in the whole set" and give six extra referrals, so that's SEVEN visitors (including the original one) for the price of one!

Now, here's the good news. I'm giving it away! If you go to http://deadlock.com/promote/ you can give me one referral and then you can download a 5K zip file at the bottom of the next page containing a sample form page, the Perl script and some simple installation instructions.

If you want to play around with it and see what the webmaster message looks like, go to http://deadlock.com/bad_url.html

** ATTENTION **

If you're going to set this up for yourself please note that a) I'm NOT offering free tech support and b) it's quite possible to construct your referral message to make it look as though the sender actually wrote the message, but don't be tempted to do this, it can annoy the sender.