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.

To improve things we have added some email address validation code that not only validates the format of the email address, but actually tries to verify that the domain exists too. We hope that this will ensure an even higher number of testimonials reach their recipient, but hope that this doesn’t throw up too many “false positives” too. If you feel that the system is being a little harsh when rejecting your email address, please let us know and we’ll take a look.

We have now implemented a widget-preview facility, which will display your widget just as it should appear when added to your website. To try it out, log in to your Vouchforthis account, go to your My Widgets page, and then select the Preview link next to the widget you want to take a look at.

[Not sure what we're talking about here? If you haven't yet added any vouchforthis testimonial widgets, you will need to log in and then go to your My Widgets page and click the New Widget button. Then you can create a widget that you will then be able to paste into your website to conveniently display the testimonials you have added to Vouchforthis. Not added any testimonials yet? Ah, testimonials are the raw material you need to add to your Vouchforthis account in order to get it working for you. To add a testimonial, log in to your account and then go to the My Testimonials page and click the New Testimonial button.]

Once you have clicked on the Preview link next to your widget, you will see a full page that shows you how your widget will appear when added to your website. This show the actual width of the widget that you have chosen, all of the component colours (text, border, background) and the actual testimonials that will be included in it. Note that as you add more testimonials to vouchforthis over time they will automatically get included in your widgets, which means that the web pages that your widgets are used in will also be updated. How convenient is that?

If you don’t like how your widget looks then you can just click on the Back To Edit button to go straight to the edit widget page where you can adjust it and try again.