My Early Report On Viralets
Thursday, June 21, 2007
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was testing Viralets, a new service designed to spread the word about websites and give them a viral traffic boost. Viralets uses a Tell-A-Friend form to trigger the virality.
Truth is, I've always had reservations about Tell-A-Friend forms. It's possible to abuse them.
Tell-A-Friend forms can trigger huge viral growth. Google, for instance, used the method to help build its Gmail base.
But some people abuse Tell-A-Friend forms, entering names of people who wouldn't be remotely interested in the product or bogus information just to receive a free product.
May I ask a courtesy? Please don't use my Viralets page to enter names of people who won't like or benefit from my products. Please do enter names of people who'd receive a boost in their marketing life by using my products.
Here's my page at Viralets:
http://viralets.com/110/PatrickPretty
Google indexed my Viralets page within 24 hours. More than 170 people visited it yesterday. I started a Squidoo Lens on it this morning.
Here's what I can say for certain right now: There is a lot of buzz about Viralets; Google appears to index the pages quickly; Viralets provides an online WYSIWYG editor to help you make web pages to advertise giveaways.
It's a decent editor, permitting you to add images, several different fonts and colors, and a decent degree of layout manipulation. You can change the background color of your ad, for example.
You ad will appear in the Viralets shell, but it won't look like every other Viralets ad if you use the tools provided.
Viralets also provides instructions on how to set up a giveaway. The basic idea is a value-for-value exchange: I'll give you this product in exchange for three names of friends who'd be interested in the offer.
But here's where you'll have to do some thinking.
When I initially set up my Viralets page, I provided a direct download link for Easy Mapper, a tool to build Google and Yahoo sitemaps quickly and easily and upload them to your server.
Easy Mapper is cool. My weblogs show that a number of people took advantage of the download.
But I didn't get to add the customers to my list because of the direct link. They received the download and moved on.
Don't get me wrong: I'm glad they got Easy Mapper. It helps them, and it helps me because my remarkably handsome face will appear in their web browser every time they use the software.
My initial strategy was to offer Easy Mapper on the first page of my Viralets offer, then place a second free item on the second page of my Viralets site. Customers could advance to the second page only if they provided three names.
No one advanced to the second page.
When I realized people were getting the download for the first page and not advancing to the second page, I took out the direct download link for Easy Mapper and added a short autoresponder form.
Customers still would get Easy Mapper free, but now they would have to go through the autoresponder to receive the link via email.
This made it more of a value-for-value deal. Customers would get a free product. In exchange, I'd get their name.
If they returned to the Viralets site and provided three names of friends, they'd be routed automatically to the second page to get the second free download.
I don't have enough data to determine if the tweaks I made will result in gathering more names in exchange for a free copy of Easy Mapper.
My plan is to give it a couple of more days and then do some more tweaking if I'm not getting the desired results.
One option is to remove Easy Mapper and replace it with "half" of a product -- for example, I could post half of a free report on the first Viralets page and instruct customers they'd have to provide three names to claim the balance of the report. It would be a download link on the second page of my Viralets site.
I'll have to do some heavy thinking before implementing that approach. The trouble, as I see it, is that it has an element of trickery in it. And I hate it when marketers try to trick me.
I wouldn't have appreciated it if my mother had given me a car with only two wheels when I was a teenager, teasing me with a set of instructions on how to get the other two wheels.
Well, come to think of it, this is a no-brainer after all.
What I'm going to do is edit my page at Viralets once again to include the direct download link for Easy Mapper; I'll leave in the form because I'll get some names that way -- maybe not a lot of names, but some names.
Viralets does create traffic. I'll work it out so everybody -- myself included -- gets the best deal possible within the constraints of the system.
That's what my mother would have done: She never would have given me a car with only two wheels.
Labels: Tell A Friend Scripts, Viralets
posted by Patrick Pretty @ 9:00 AM,
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