Increase your member growth with a Super Brand New Way to Invite.

[Garfield Creator]

A whole new approach and new tool to growing your network.
When you are looking to grow your network you can come up with some pretty creative stuff as some creators have done here. I am about to take the something that is no longer used here on Creators and turn it on it's head. If you can follow my logic you may see why this would help grow your network - maybe even to 10,000 members in 3 months or less.

The Invite Method used successfully by Facebook and many other social networks.
Remember the "Invite" tab? It allowed your members to send an invite to their friends through  gaining access to their email address book so they could choose who to invite. A script would actually ask them to enter their email username and password (WTF? I know ). Apparently this helped Facebook grow really fast. A lot of social networks used this kind of script including Ning. It's a 1 to many approach. As each "1" member joins they have an opportunity to invite "many" in their email address book. In fact, below is the kind of html email invite their friends would get. I had to send one to myself to investigate what could be done to improve the process.

I invite you to take a look at this.

This is an invite makeover I took some time to work on. One of the things you'll notice is that it has been updated to include the new social sign in options (Something the last invite wasn't updated to take into account) This is very important because there is a certain segment of the population for whom social sign in would make a difference in their choosing to join your network.  What is different?

• I took out the members photos (Unless those members will be recognized by the person being invited they are just colorful pics)
• I took out stats info about the network. (A new network may not want to show they have 5 members and 2 discussions).
• I switched focus from the person doing the inviting to the Network. We are niche communities. The community should hold enough interest to the person being invited. 
• Also the message in the footer is a further call to action for the invitee to continue sharing the invite that is now generic enough to pass on and not limited to the person initiating the invite.

This invite will allow you to customize the text for both key site bullets & "About" section as well as the images. In this way you have full creative freedom in how you share your network. You can just copy the html below and paste it to the HTML Tab of your Broadcast message window then click the Visual editor and replace with your own text

This is where you can really make this invite shine because you can really detail out why someone should join your network more than ever before.  I really feel this is something new and useful for any network and you can see the clear logic behind it. It's actually simpler and too the point. This is an invite I sent to my email inbox showing how the invite would look like. The html is attached to this discussion.

Instructions

• Copy the attached code to the HTML Tab of your Broadcast Message. 
• Flip back to the visual editor tab and admire it for a few seconds before editing the text for you network. 
• Send yourself a preview. It's that simple.

The actual html is below. If someone actually prefers to fill out a form fot the text and images I will have one available on my other network but it is probably just as simple to edit inside the Visual editor of the broadcast message.

Context and overview and Logic

You are basically sending your members a broadcast message with an invite template that they can forward to people in their address book. Given you let your members know ahead of time that this is what you plan to do in a future broadcast message you can enlist their help to spread the love and grow your network. Benefits to your members:

• They don't have to enter their username and password in a script to access their address book. THEY ARE ALREADY THERE! All they have to do is hit forward and add as many people as they want.
• They can customize the forwarding text to add their own unique pitch to their friends about why your network is so cool to join. This takes care of "Social Proof" as one of the Network Creators mentioned below.
• The Social Sign in buttons are instantly recognizable to potential members. You may need to customize for which ones you use on your network.
• Those potential members can themselves continue to spread the word by forwarding the invitation as you suggest in the footer.

I recommend you get your own social sign in buttons. I will be deleting the ones in this template since the draw on the server where these image are hosted may be too much if everyone and their mother uses this.

You can download them yourself at from this site (PSD files), create your own or right click and save these images and upload them to your Network to get the image URLs. You can use my images to see how it would look for a few days but you'll want to get your own images because if I delete mine (which I will) your invite template will not show the images.

If you would like more creative ideas like this join my group here on Creators called "Creator's Dashboard"

I also run a pay network for Creators called Creator's University. I invite you to join. One of the reasons I can share something like this which seems like advice some would pay for is that as good as this tip is I have even better ones in reserve for my network. Stuff I will never share on Creators for several reasons and my members wouldn't wan to share either because they will be that much more ahead of the game. Join if you want and don't you don't want to.

If you have any questions about this invite or anything else leave a comment.

A network creator has already used this for their network and even customized it and made it their own which I love.

[Tiffany Lane-Crane]

Garfield, you're the greatest, I've put together a tester and you're right, this was really simple. Gonna now figure out the steps to download the links to the buttons. Thanks so much for this! 

[Garfield Creator]

You can and anyone else reading this can also simply right click and download the images as is (if your fine with the quality) and save them to your desktop and upload them to your network and use your network's image URLs.

[Lana Mack]

Hi Garfield,

  I need all the help I can get. Please let us all know when this is ready for use.

Thanks

Lana

[Garfield Creator]

The HMTL code is attached to the discussion. You can copy and paste it into the HTML tab of your broadcast message window and edit. If you need further help send me a message letting me know what you are looking for beyond this.

Good luck!

[Scott Bishop]

Hi Garfield,

Where to we find the link address of "Click to Join" that will make the sender automatic friends with the invited when they join?

After all, each link would be different..?

[Garfield Creator]

This is one of the things I and anyone else using this may have to sacrifice. This invite will be coming from the network creator to all members of the network in the form of a broadcast message. So it is a generic invite with a link you specify to your sign up page or anywhere else you want your members to go.

However, if you want you can use the special invite link an NC gets and this way anyone who joins using that link will automatically become friends with the Network Creator. Can the invite be personalized with a custom link for each member? It's not something I investigated too much to have an answer for now. The main focus at this stage was expanding invitations to potential members.

[Scott Bishop]

I thought that might be a difficult one. Maybe try asking Ning help desk?

Anyways I'm just going to use the "Create a New Invitation" link from the Privacy section of our Manager Dashboard.

Great tip btw!

Oh, are you creating a page with your html attachment and replacing the Invite page with it? (that part I didn't quite get)

[Garfield Creator]

This sounds like something perfect for Ning API. If I really wanted to focus on it I could probably figure something out but I have other projects like this I want to get out the door.  I think the "Create a New Invitation" is exactly what I am talking about.

Any NC who shares that link will have the person who joins automatically become a friend.

Thanks for the Kudos on the tip. You were the inspiration for the "Best of the Week" template and ultimately this tip. I got the idea from you chatting with Jen in a discussion about creating an html broadcast message.

Not sure what you are talking about regarding creating a page but I will be a little more clearer about what I think you are referring to. On another site Creators University I have a form members can fill out that after clicking submit will take them to a page with the HTML for this invite to past into their broadcast message. They just need to put in the right links and text when filling out the form - sort of fill in the blanks kind of stuff.

[Luciano Costa]

This is a great idea and want to implement it. Unfortunately I'm not an expert techie and need some help with social plug in images. I downloaded the zip file but am not able to use the images because I don't have Photoshop. Is it possible that you email me the above 4 images individually as a jpg file or similar? Thank you.

[Garfield Creator]

You know what. I'll see if I can attach them to the discussion. This would really make it complete. Sorry I hadn't thought of it earlier.

[Luciano Costa]

Awesome. Thank you.

[soaringeagle]

i hate to be a downer but

we did a contest giving away free stuff for the most invites that join i sent this out to all members to forward to anyone they want to invite

and then they invites were to either put in the profile who invited them or message me

not 1 join had said they were invited

i get plenty of joins daily but this seems to have done nothing at all to increasing that and ontop of that the contest was useless

so now i have to come up with a new reason to give the stuff away