Tell a Friend
A recommendation from family and friends is the most powerful form of marketing, online or offline. This is why adding a "Tell a friend!", "Invite a friend", or "Email this" link to your site or pages is a great (and free) way to increase your marketing reach. It doesn't have to be complicated—a simple link to launch an e-mail program or a simple form to send the information on to another person is really all it takes. For the spam-weary, you may also want to include a note saying you are merely forwarding the email, not saving the other person's e-mail address in any way.
What doesn't work? The forms that were popular a few years ago where you put in a list of e-mail contacts and the site would spam all your friends by adding them to the mailing list. This is not a good way to make friends—for the person adding the e-mail addresses or for the site adding people to the mailing list without permission.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is when you give your readers the ability to tag, describe, and organize links to your content in their own online bookmarking accounts. It acts like a personal recommendation in that it says, "This content was good enough for me to want to share it and/or save it for later." Social bookmarking can come in the form of tagged link lists or in the form of third party ratings on your content.
You can learn more about social bookmarking by trying out some of these more popular social bookmarking sites:
The ability to add social bookmarking to your site is really easy thanks to the widgets available at AddThis. By installing AddThis, your users can add your content to their bookmark list with a single click.
Social Networking
At any site offering social participation, you can create a marketing campaign. The procedure is about the same as it is for forums: create an account, login and/or profile, and then start participating! Remember to follow the same etiquette rules we outlined in the forums discussion. If you haven't tried social networking before, here are a few sites to get you started: