They really wanted to use vouchforthis, but considered that the email that gets sent to request a testimonial was too wordy. We have worked together to come up with a shorter, snappier testimonial email that gets sent to your customer, and hope that this results in a higher acceptance rate for your testimonial requests.

The new message looks like this. As always, if this causes problems for you or your clients, please let us know and we’ll sort things out for you…

[Your name] has joined vouchforthis.com to manage recommendations and testimonials and told us that you provided this one for them…

“[Your testimonial]”

We hope that you can verify this by clicking the link below, as it greatly improves the credibility of a testimonial if the testimonial giver has confirmed it. You will be able to change the wording and edit the testimonial signature if you are not happy with it.

I am happy to edit or confirm this testimonial

I prefer not to confirm this testimonial

[Your name] has sent you a personal message to accompany this request…

“[Your personal message goes here]”

Of course, if you’re just requesting a testimonial without suggesting one, or if you’re sending a testimonial request and haven’t added your own personal message, then the email will look slightly different but still shorter than it was before.

1. To protect the main site from malicious attacks
2. To improve performance by utilising their CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDN’s work by replicating website pages and putting them on servers in various locations around the globe. This helps speed up website traffic by reducing the number of hops a website visitors request needs to make before it finds the content – the closer your content is to your website visitor (generally), the better it is

Our hope is that this change in service will be beneficial to our users. Apart from a slightly improved performance, we don’t expect you to notice any differences. So if you do notice a problem, please let us know about it.

You told us you wanted to create your testimonial widgets so that they automatically expand to fill the space available to them in your website. This would help when placing the same widget in more than one place within your site – for example, in the main content section of your page and in a narrow sidebar, or where you weren’t sure what pixel width you have available to you.

To create a variable-width widget, just add your (or edit an existing) widget and set the Width field (see above) to 0 (zero).

Then save the widget and you’re done!

We have now made it even easier to broadcast your testimonial to your Twitter followers. This is how it works :

• When your testimonial gets verified you will receive the usual email telling you it has been approved. In this email you will see a link that says ‘Share Your Testimonial on Twitter’…



• Click the email link and you will be presented with the Twitter Share application. Alternatively, you can do the same by logging in to your vouchforthis account, viewing your testimonial list, and then selecting ‘Share on Twitter’ for the testimonial you want to share…

• The tweet text will already be completed for you, but you are of course free to edit it if you like. The tweet automatically generates a url shortcode which links directly to a page on the Vouchforthis website that shows ONLY your testimonial…

Even better news is that your clients (those that provide the testimonials for you) will also be given the opportunity to Tweet the testimonial to their followers – should they be inclined to do so.

I think this is a great way to promote your testimonial to your followers, and am working on similar ways to broadcast to other social networks.

So we have added a new page… Latest Member Testimonials to display in reverse chronological order the latest active testimonials.

Hopefully, this will attract a little more search traffic to the site as well as showing visitors that the site is active. We’ll update it over the next few days to include upload dates, and hope to extend it further over the next couple of months so that it becomes a full-blown, searchable directory of testimonials helping visitors to search for companies (YOU) that can demonstrate verified testimonials for products and services that they are looking for.

Ultimately, we believe that this will greatly increase the value of vouchforthis to your business.

What this means is that you will now be automatically credited with sending new members to us if any of your website visitors click the ‘more’ link at the foot of the website testimonial widget.

This doesn’t stop you from also including your referrer id in other links from your web pages or in emails to your contacts – but you will need to do that yourself

Find out how to earn referral income by recommending your friends to vouchforthis

So in order to make it just a little harder to ‘forge’ a vouchforthis widget we have changed the link at the foot of each widget so that instead of giving a link just to the vouchforthis home page we now link to a vouchforthis page which verifies that the person using the widget is actually a vouchforthis member. It even names the member in case the forger tries using a link belonging to somebody else. If a link does happen to point to an invalid member then we are sent an email alering us to this fact so that we can investigate and ask the offending website owner to take the widget down.

Passing products off as authentic when they are not is a problem affecting all walks of business life, from handbags to music to software. At the end of the day we are delighted when website owners try to mimic our widgets, as it shows that they have appreciated the value of our system of verifying testimonials. What they should also be appreciating is that at just £9.99 per year it is far better to own the real thing.

We think that this is the best default for testimonials displayed on your website, with the newest testimonials being displayed in a more visible part of the browser window.

Please note : you will need to rebuild your widgets manually if you want this to take effect on your websites straight away. To do this, simply go to your My Widgets page and click Edit , Preview and Save against each of your widgets in turn. This will fool the system into thinking you have changed your widget and so it will rebuild them, changing the order of your testimonials as it does so.

You can find out all about the new feature here, but in a nutshell :

1. We provide you with a choice of graphics
2. You paste the graphic into your web pages
3. Your website visitors can then click on the graphic and be brought directly to Vouchforthis where they can leave a testimonial for you
4. The testimonial will be automatically verified, and all you need to do is log in to your vouchforthis account and activate the testimonial if you are happy with it

Why not try it out by clicking one of the sample graphics on the right of this post?

A simple, and we hope, effective tool to help you get more testimonials. As well as receiving testimonials from “casual” browsers of your website for whom you may have previously worked, you can also point your existing customers to your website page and ask them to click the link if they would like to leave you a testimonial. This greatly reduces your own involvement – and you end up with a testimonial that is already “vouched-for”.

Don’t see a graphic that you like? Want something a little more customised for your website? Why not ask us to build one for you?

As awareness of the vouchforthis website increases so should the credibility of the testimonials we display – and that means yours too! So please help us to spread the word (and earn some valuable commission in the process) by encouraging your contacts to join by passing your referral code on to them verbally or through emails. Increase your earning ability even further by displaying our adverts on your website.

We think this is a great way of spreading the word about our product, and we hope that as many of you as possible embrace this opportunity to introduce your contacts / friends / colleagues to vouchforthis.

To find out more about the scheme, please visit our Referrer Information page.