A Recommend Form Alternative

Recommend forms on websites can hold privacy concerns for your site visitor. No matter how boldly you state, "We don't spam," or "We never share your email address, nor the addresses of your friends," some will not believe you.

Don't get me wrong. Recommend forms still work. They're just not used as much as they were in the past. (I don't have hard numbers, just my observation over the years. We've been using recommend forms ever since I wrote our first tell-a-friend script in 1998.)

If you wish to alleviate privacy concerns that recommend forms can hold, this article talks about a practical option. It is the affordable Email .This. Link software.

With Email .This. Link, site visitors click a link which opens their default email program — with your custom message pre-written.

Because the email is being sent from their own email program, users have no reasonable privacy fears.

Here is a short features list.

• Email .This. Link will work on regular web pages, PHP web pages, and even for blogs. A placeholder can be used to automatically insert the web page title.

• The software's control panel is used to specify the link text (and/or image), the pre-written subject of the email, and the pre-written body content of the email. Placeholders can be used to automatically insert the web page title and URL.

• The link code is copied from the control panel and pasted into your web page or template.

Let's suppose you specify the following:

Link text: Click to email this "[[TITLE]]" link!

Email subject: Check this page, [[TITLE]]

Email body content —

You gotta read this.
[[URL]]

Seriously.

It's [[TITLE]]

When the control panel generated code is placed on a web page with the title "A Lot About Everything" and URL http://example.com/sixreasons.php, then the clickable link will be seen as:

Click to email this "A Lot About Everything" link!

When the link is clicked, the user's email program launches. The subject line is pre-written with:

Check this page, A Lot About Everything

And the email body is pre-written with:

You gotta read this.
http://example.com/sixreasons.php

Seriously.

It's A Lot About Everything

Now, when someone receives a personal email from a friend, they are interested. The site visitor pre-qualifies their friends by sending links to those who s/he thinks would like your website.

People might not believe your own statements about yourself. But they believe their friends.

Similar links can be put on as many web pages as you wish.

Email .This. Link is available in the WebSite's Secret membership area. Log-in, if you haven't recently.