Help people share your content

People love to share good websites with their friends when they come across them. I am always receiving new emails from friends and family for different websites that they think I will like or should check out.  By making your content easy to share you can drive a lot of new traffic and links to your site. Here are some ways you can help people share your content by making it easy for them to do so.

Tell a friend
One of the easiest ways to help your content spread is to add "tell a friend" links on your site. People click these links and then add the emails of people who they would like to introduce that page to. Believe it or not these actually get used a lot. One of the best examples of this that I have seen is on Craigslist. In the top right hand corner of the listing pages they have a link that says "email this posting to a friend", when you click on the link there is a form where all you do is enter both your email address and your friend’s, then when you hit submit it sends an email to your friend, and you are sent right back to the listing you came from. I have also noticed that people will often use these links to email themselves so they donât forget about the page and can remember to come back at a later time.

URLs
There are a number of reasons that short, static URLs are important to have, helping your content spread is one of them. A short URL is easier to remember and also easier to tell someone else. For example, MySpace allows users to create custom URLs for their profiles. So lets say that I chose myspace.com/olthuis, how easy is that for me to tell people and have them actually remember the URL? It’s pretty easy. A lot easier than a URL like this: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=138203302. That would be impossible for not only me to remember but also anyone that I tell. Shorter URLs also make content a lot more linkable.

Not only do these things help your content spread but they also improve the usability of your site.  Consider adding "tell a friend" links and making other improvements to your site so that itâs easier for people to share it with others.