“Email This Article to a Friend” WordPress Plugins
You probably noticed that most mainstream media websites have an “Email this article” link on most of their pages, right? Lately many blogs started employing this feature too. But how do you add that feature to your own blog? There are two plugins that you can use for that purpose.
The first one is called WP-Email. It will basically insert an “Email this article” link below your posts, and once the user clicks there he will be sent to a page where he just need to fill in the details to send the article to someone. Here is a screenshot of how that page looks like:
Another plugin that does that job is the email2friend. The only difference is that instead of sending the user to another page it will open a new window where the forms will appear, as the image below illustrates.
I think the “email to a friend” feature is a cool one, although I am not sure how often it is used. Have you ever used it on your site? How often did your readers used it?
Daniel Scocco on December 13, 2008
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I had “email this” on my blogs but it didn’t seems to provide any extra exposure so I removed it to simplify and unclutter my articles. I’ve never used this option personally as I’d rather use Twitter or IM to recommend pages.
I did the same with the social media links as I found those not working either. Now I have profiles directly at social media sites and I also use plugin Referrer Detector on my blog to get visitors to submit/vote on social media. I find this to be a better option as only targeted visitors get the message, not all visitors.
Marko
I used to have this on my blogger version. It was not the same plugin as mentioned here but one for blogspot. I didnt add it after I switched to wordpress as people were not really using it. To recommend pages I prefer to place a linkback on my blog or use social network too.
The problem with it is that there are only few people that use it. Feedburner have an email this feature too for rss feeds but as far as i know, nobody uses it.
Anyway, i hope someone will promote it soon.
I’ve seen the same lack of use. Personally, I’d rather send someone a link than give a third party a friends’ and my email when I can just copy and past the URL and do my own email.
However, I do tend to email posts out of google reader because it pulls from my contact list already and it won’t require them to click out to the site if they don’t want to.
I have never emailed an article to a friend, so I guess that it has no use. (But maybe that’s just in the IM niche.)
I think that e-mails are good for some niche and not really for others.
In other words, the more technology advanced and comprehensive your readers are, the more likely they are to use another mean to share your page, like twitter, social media sites, IM and simply cope paste your url.
Between the two forms, I prefer the second one for a simple reason: Less forms to fil. Too many forms are likely to discourage the reader from actually filling them up.
Pure speculation on my part but I can’t help but think that a major factor in how useful it is to you is how much you promote it to your audience. It’s kind of like RSS feeds. Like has been said so many times (on this site too); ask and you shall receive. If you ask people to email their friends they probably well.
Another thing that I think plays into the effectiveness is the type of site you are and the type of audience you attract. I’m not going to email people old news. If the majority of the people visiting a site are on the front page, where things are fresh, then I can see them using it. But in the archives I doubt it works as well IF your content is out-dated and not relevant. For example talking about how Ron Paul would make a good president and should get the nomination. The election is over, why would I send it to people.
I use the Share This button. It provides E-Mail support along with social media and blog posting support. It requires you to create an account but you get a nice little dashboard showing how many times your readers have “shared” an article, to what service and which posts.
I agree with Rob Williams. If I need to send an article to a couple of people, I copy the link and use gmail. I also noticed in my Statcounter, that often people come directly to a certain post from various geographic locations: it’s the result of emailing by thoughtful friends.
At the same time, I think that just seeing a line (plugin or not) “Share with a friend” may trigger the action of actually emailing it in any acceptable fashion.
Im using the ShareThis widget on my blog, it allso has the “email-to-friend” feature.
I email links to friends all the time. Or more specifically, my mom or sisters, but I just use the send link feature included with the browser. Seems to me like it’s easier than filling out a form.
As a a reader, i used that 1 time, maybe 2.
As a webmaster, sometimes i use the ShareThis, but like everybody already said, almost no one uses it
Do you recommend Wordpress over Typepad?
it definitely looks like a good plugin. I already have one that is similar, but this happens to look like a better one.
Hello
Not bad, there are countless ways of sharing content these days. I just don’t see these plugins doing so well. I don’t have any need for them but who knows maybe some folks will find them useful.
Thanks for sharing.
-mig
I’m inclined to agree there’s not much need for this type of thing — on one site I administer, it’s used VERY little.
My own concern about having it is spammer abuse.
But I do stick with having the Sociable plugin on my main WP sites.
I think this works well only for news sites. I don’t thinks blogs need it. Very less % people will use the features anyway.
I had released a contact commenters plugin earlier last week. That’s more for bloggers than reader. Check out those who are interested
http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....commenters
(this was meant to be released for the blogging idol competion
things did not work the way I wanted then)
@TalkTurkey, yeah.
email this is useful for your blog
Siphs - now called smbzen - combines social bookmarking with the email-it idea
http://www.sciencetext.com/soc.....r-way.html
Shaaaweet! I am totally adding this to my site!
wp-email works good because you get stats of who used it, so you can see hwo often is is getting used
unfortunately it relies on calling the posts premalink so if you are using feed-word-press and linking to the originalfeedurl it won work
ill have to try this second one and see if it has the same issue
you are right.I used the type 1.every time,Email is useful.Thanks for your info.
I will try this plugin, I hope it will give me good performance