You know that we're always looking for a new, hot tool of the month. Sometimes we find them after doing some serious research, and other times we get lucky, and it happens serendipitously. It was like that this month with www.referralblast.com.

Some friends were visiting the Big Apple, and asked us to recommend a good day spa. After some searching, we wound up at www.mariobadescu.com. There was a link on the page that said "send this site to a friend" so we decided to give it a whirl; we wanted our impressionable friends to see for themselves all the celebrities who frequented this establishment. Anyway, we proceeded to enter their 8 email addresses, clicked the submit button and voila! - the notifications went off into cyberspace. Then it hit us: we had just sent 8 qualified leads to the badescu site, providing them with the potential for eight new customers! But what did we get out of it? Aside from thank yous from friends who wanted to splurge in New York City, we actually got a lot more than we bargained for. Why? Because after some investigating, we found we could add the same functionality to Net Listings in under 10 minutes. What a find!

So, through a lucky coincidence we are now singing the praises of one of the best website traffic generating tools we've found in years. You've probably seen buttons and hyperlinks on various sites in the form of "Send this site to a friend" or "Refer a friend". Well, www.ReferralBlast.com is the site that provides this service to www.hrblock.com, www.mariobadescu.com , www.caruba.com and to some other well-known (and some not too familiar) sites. We actually found the site via a small "Powered By ReferralBlast.com" icon at the bottom of Mario Badescu's pop-up window. Anyway, what we discovered at the Referral Blast site was a 3-step do-it-yourself process that would end up landing an attractive (and functional) 'Send this site to a friend' button right onto our site. The 3-step walkthrough was a no-brainer: all we had to do was select the 'Send this site to a friend' button that we wanted to have appear on our site, answer 3 or 4 questions about our site (URL, site title, description, etc.) and then select the version we wanted. There are three variations of the service available: Lite, Standard, and Custom. For those on a tight budget, you can begin with the 'Lite' version. We chose the Custom version, because it was important to us that the pop-up window perfectly reflected our site design, but they say that both the Custom and Standard versions have the capability to drive in 10 times the traffic of the Lite.

Two things we really liked about ReferralBlast.com: 1) the level of marketing expertise these people seem to have and how they clearly explain the benefits and pitfalls regarding numerous online marketing methods, and 2) the opportunity it gives you website owners out there to add a powerful word-of-mouth tool to your site - ON THE SPOT - without doing any programming or downloading any complicated scripts or software. In fact, you don't need to have any particular hosting setup or special scripts to support it! They claim it works with any website, and since they have been on-target with just about everything else, we have no reason to doubt them.

And as you all know, we do our homework. With the scarcity of these types of marketing tools on the Internet, we went on a mission to find other quality services. We couldn't find any. Either they 'harvested' email addresses or slapped gimmicky "win-this", "win-that" ads all over the pop-up window. Referral Blast's privacy policy & code of conduct clearly state that Referral Blast does not participate in these activities. One major downfall of these other services is that they redirected users from whatever website they were on originally to an email address 'fill-in' page. Referral Blast is different in that it's a small pop-up window that does not remove visitors from your site; when visitors are finished using it, they simply close the window. For Net Listings, that's extremely important, and should be to all you other website owners as well.

We know for a fact that the best form of advertising on the Web is word-of-mouth. Since we "discovered" Referral Blast, there's not a day that goes by that we aren't cranking out a bunch of those little Referral Blast notifications, generating more unique visitors. Our stats confirm it, Referral Blast's email alerts confirm it; we're getting more traffic! And no one can argue with results like that.

This nifty little marketing tool can be picked up at http://www.ReferralBlast.com