Using Feedburner for Word-of-Mouth marketing

Every business is aware (or should be!) of the power Word-of-Mouth - it is regarded as the best (and 'cheapest') way to promote your business, products and/or service. On the Web it is no different.

Word-of-Mouth can be hard to establish, how do you get (unknown) visitors to your website talking about you? Of course it starts with having something that's worthwhile to talk about, be it your excellent service record, your excellent and high value for money products or excellent and useful content on your website.

Supposing you have all that in order, what is the next step to entice Word-of-Mouth? You can rely on other 'bloggers' picking up your content and linking back to it; you can rely on others Tweeting about it or mentioning your page and/or product on Facebook, a forum or whatever social media of their choice.

There is however a very simple way to help this Word-of-Mouth on its way: "email this to your friend". A simple link at the bottom of your article/post/landing page that automagically opens your visitor's email program, has already a subject and perhaps even some body text of your choice. The coding for this is not that difficult, click on this link to see an example of the result. (If you hover over the link it will display the actual code).

There is even a simpler way if you publish articles/post in a blog and have set up - of course you have - a Feedburner account. In Feedburner you have various additional options and extras. One of them is called FeedFlare (under the Optimise Tab)

Select at least "Email This" on Site, activate the service and as soon as the article feed is picked up by Feedburner it does the rest! (So sometimes it takes 5 - 10 minutes before the actual "email this" link appears - but it definitely will)

Every article will now automagically have a link at the bottom of your article to a webfrom where your webvisitor can fill in his/her email address as sender and send a message to one of his/her friends. It's as easy as that! And it works on most blog-platforms.

See below and why not try it out?

Comments

[Shuaib]

Hi Karin

Interesting tip (ie the first bit where u click on the link and it opens your email program / fills in the subject line and some content), and quite timely for me as I have recently been thinking about how to do this.

Just one clarification: Does it work if your visitor is using Gmail / Hotmail for their email? I ask because I notice it opened up Outlook at work, but it doesn't trigger Gmail (which I use for personal email).

And if I can add another thing to that: it shouldn't be impossible to get it to open in Gmail (maybe some setting needs to be tweaked), because I am sure I have seen some links which seem to be intelligent enough to do so(maybe they somehow communicate with the Windows system which then tells them that this particular user uses Gmail (or any other webmail) as his email client).

As for Feedburner stuff, for me personally that sounds a bit more involved so I rather try the simple stuff first (go one step at a time, eh?).

The other option (which you don't seem to have covered in this post) is having a form (a bit like the Aweber forms) that some people have at the bottom of their post which says something like "Tell a Friend" and then has 2 boxes where you put said 'friend's" name and email address and press SUBMIT (a bit like the Feedburner example except that it doesn't seem to require the need for a Feedburner account and doesn't open in a new page).

I have seen many examples of this and quite like that format, however never been sure if it's simple to implement.

Perhaps you can "unmyth me" about that in one of your future posts.

Thanks again.

Shuaib

[Karin H.]

Hi Shuaib

As you know: I like to keep things simple ;-) And the two examples above are the most simple items you can embed in blogs and/or webpages.
The email link triggers the default email program you have on your pc/laptop. If that's gmail then is can trigger that, if you only use gmail online then I'm afraid you need much more scripting - which I don't have enough experiences in, perhaps someone else reading this can enlighten us?

Same with the form: more scripting - so, be my guest if you know a simple solution for this.

Karin H. (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)