Promoting your business involves utilizing every way possible that allows you to reach new customers. Whether paying for advertising space or discussing the aims and goals of your business at dinner, pushing your business further is always on your mind. In your quest to uncover all of the outlets your business can employ in becoming bigger, never forget the most basic and brilliant form of building a buzz: word of mouth.

Because many businesses offer the same services and products, each day is a challenge for small business owners to reach new people while showing why their business matters. If your business already has many customers, you are already well on your way to achieving this goal. All of your customers have friends (hopefully), and if they share similarities, these friends may just be your next award-winning customers.

You can make it easy on your customers by including a “Send a Friend” button on your website. With the chance to pass along information that may be of interest to their acquaintances and family members, many customers do actually use these buttons. While using other businesses to help promote your own company and paying for advertising space are great tools to help increase your success, this kind of indirect promotion is invaluable. Perhaps the greatest aspect of this kind of marketing is that it requires absolutely no work from you! With all of the other jobs you must finish as a small business owner, enlisting help from customers at no charge is especially appealing.

Why is a “Send a Friend” button such a good tool? Because this is a third party way of telling people about your products and services. Consider these buttons a kind of good press coverage on a smaller level. They take the pressure off you to sell your business and allow your faithful customers to do it for you. Rather than dreading another shameless pop-up ad, customers can trust what their friends send them. Customers disregard banner ads everyday, dismissing them as just another way to waste money. However, receiving something from a trusted friend makes them much more likely to check out the information. While especially loyal customers can type your URL and send it to their friends via email, including a button on your site increases the probability that these whispers of word of mouth will reach other consumers’ ears.

These buttons may seem like an elementary idea, and that’s because they are. However, this simple kind of grassroots promotion can dramatically increase your website traffic. Rather than just including an opportunity to send your website address to a friend, you can include a form with your site’s “Send a Friend” button. The sender can make comments about the site that directs the receiver on the other end to understand why your site is worth their time.

In an online market where competition grows steeper everyday, “Send a Friend” buttons offer a chance to leapfrog other small businesses. Get new customers, increase your email list and build your sales with the help of others.