Whole books are being written about how to get more traffic to your website. The number of hits it receives and, even more importantly, the number of user sessions, are the lifeblood of a website. We are now in an era where every enterprise, large and small, requires a presence on the Internet. It is integral to all aspects of public relations. 

Website owners receive countless email offers that promise more traffic. They describe mass emailing marketing programs and the like, but the real secret of the Internet is word of mouth. Like a small community, the Net is made up both of millions of people at any given moment, but also of highly vertical markets or niches of people who have, for the most part, very specific interests. 

I own and operate four websites. All this is the result of the help and advice I have received from my Web design firm, Mangobone.com. Some time ago, my Webmaster came to me with an offer to add a unique feature on my anxietycenter.com site. He called it Referral Blast. It was a button that opened a pop-up window providing the user the opportunity to tell up to ten of his or her friends about the site. Within days of adding Referral Blast, I began to receive email notifications indicating that people were recommending my site. Within weeks, the traffic became overwhelming. Word of mouth!

Two features of Referral Blast are particularly noteworthy: it does not require any cumbersome or complicated installation and programming, and the user's privacy is guaranteed because the addition of this feature does not include the "harvesting" of email addresses. Thus users are assured that it will not lead to "spamming." This is ideal for commercial websites because it does not interfere with privacy policies, while all the time encouraging greater traffic volume. For sites that permit responsible information collection, there is a version called "Referral Blast Custom" that can be tailored to their specific marketing needs.

My Webmaster had earlier recommended that I offer a free "subscriber" opportunity to anyone who wanted a weekly reminder that a new column at my Web site was posted. The subscriber list had bumped along with a relatively small number of people who provided their email addresses. After Referral Blast, not only did the number of readers jump, the number of subscribers took off to the point where a huge emailing goes out weekly to accommodate them. The traffic to anxietycenter can only be described as phenomenal.

The shake-out of failed dot.coms, taking billions of venture capital and investor's money with them has made people nervous about the Internet, but it is still new and ways to make it work effectively are still being explored. The rate of speed for the introduction of new technology and its impact on our lives has increased during the second half of the last century. It took a long time for things like the telephone and various home appliances to catch on. It took only about a decade for television to reach into every home. The home computer has become an established part of our lives virtually overnight.

Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2006
Permission to quote in whole or part is granted.

All material © 2006 Alan Caruba. All rights reserved.