Viral Inviter VS TrafficXplode 2.0 Review

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 the unsettled discussion on where to best place the tell-a-friend page would be on a page. After opt-in? After sign up? After log out?  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, 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 cliché.

In this Web 2.0 world, these are the basic requirements that every tell-a-friend system should have

• Support as many email clients as possible including popular clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, Msn and AOL.
• Integrate flawlessly with any kind of website, regular site, e-commerce, marketing, blog, forum, mini-site and etc.
• Customizable look and feel
• Automatic gift rewarding system
• Scalability : the ability to use tell-a-friend system on several sites
• Reliability : the deliverability of the emails that are sent by visitors
• Extra features such as statistics, tracking

 

Other things to consider when it comes to picking the right tell-a-friend system is whether or not you need to install the script on your server. Often times the tell-a-friend script is offered in PHP/MySQL platform, so those who are running a windows server won’t be able to take advantage of the script. It also applies to those who use cheap a shared hosting account because the provider usually doesn’t allow certain scripts to run or the provider might ban the account due to excessive use of the server resource by running those scripts. And another thing about shared hosting is the bandwidth issue. So, there are advantages and disadvantages when it comes to installing your own script.

 

There are two latest tell-a-friend systems that will be available very soon, Viral Inviter by Norman Freeman and TrafficXplode 2.0 by Jaratvit R. So let’s take a look at how these two compare

 

Viral Inviter

 

Number of email clients support: 37

Integrates with all kind of sites – checked

Customizable look and feel – checked

Automatic gift rewarding system – checked

Scalability: per-server-license

Reliability: SMTP-based email engine

Extra features: Self-promoting; Auto include affiliate link of the current visitor in the invitation messages.

Fee: one-time

 

TrafficXplode 2.0

 

Number of email clients support: around 20

Integrate with all kind of sites – checked

Customizable look and feel – checked

Automatic gift rewarding system – checked

Scalability: unlimited

Reliability: built on top of industrial standard autoresponder software

Extra features:

• Social Network friends importer from Myspace, Facebook, Orkut, Friendster and Hi5
• For social friends, messages are sent using internal message system of each network
• Multi-level gift assignment, reward gifts according to the number of invitations sent (user defined)

                                                        

• Full statistics such as gift page impressions, click through rate, email open rates                                                     

 

•  Web-based tell-a-friend page management                                                                                                                            

                                  

So it’s up to you to decide which solution is right for you.

Learn more by visiting

ViralInviter: http://www.viralinviter.com

TrafficXplode 2.0 : http://www.trafficxplode.com