"Tell A Friend" loosing its touch…

I had a recent request on my tutorial video page to record a tutorial about using “Tell A Friend” forms to further syndicate web pages and blog posts.

Before you watch my video about how to utilize the Cforms plugin to create a “tell a friend” form I want to quickly review the true application and purpose.

In our modern marketing world the tell a friend tactic is growing less and less common. Social news and social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious are making it easier to share web pages, blogs, etc with your online network. You need only share a link on your Facebook profile and all of your friends are exposed to it instantly. If any of them comment on it then all of their friends also become exposed to it. This is what we refer to as “viral.” How much more powerful is that type of syndication than trying to manually enter your friends email address and name so they can get an email telling them about this page?

There are still some simple applications for the tell a friend forms but let me emphasize that you would be much better off to put a “Digg” button, or a share on Facebook/Twitter link at the end of your blog post than to request that your readers manually fill out a form with the names and email addresses of a few friends. WordPress offers several great plugins for offering simple syndication of your posts by your readers. My favorites include the “Social bookmarking” plugin and the “Digg Digg” plugin.

That all having been said here is the 10 minute or less tutorial video about utilizing the “Tell A Friend” form and the mentioned plugins.