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 unsettled discussion on where is the best place to put the tell-a-
friend page, after opt-in? after sign up? after log out? and 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 in 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 thing 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 time the tell-a-
friend script is offered in PHP/MySQL platform, so those who are running window
server won’t be able to take advantage of the script. It also applies to those who use
cheap shared hosting account because the provider usually doesn’t allow certain script
to run or the provider might ban the account due to excessive use of the server
resource by running script. And other thing about shared hosting is the bandwidth
issue. So, there are advantages and disadvantages when it comes to installing your
own script.
Advantages
- You are in control
- One-time cost
Disadvantages
- Take up a lot of sever resources
- Per-server license cost
- Require technical skill
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
Integrate 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 feature:
- 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
