Buy Me a Drink Review
The other day I ran across a product that really made me laugh. I thought it was a really cute concept and figured if I used it my friends and some favorite clients would really get a kick out of it.
After a little investigation, I realized it had a few serious uses as well as being a light-hearted distraction. The product is called [tag]Buy Me a Drink[/tag] and is the brainchild of [tag]John Delavera[/tag] of [tag]TurboHQ[/tag].
The concept is simple. You do a favor for someone and they would like to repay you in some way. The old way in the localized offline world was to say “buy me a drink” or “buy me lunch.”
That worked great when your benefactor sat in the office down the hall or the store in the next block. But what about on the Internet where you in the USA might be doing a good turn for Klaus in Munich or Sanjay in Mumbai or vice versa?
Buy Me a Drink can be customized to offer a variety of products that grateful recipient of a service can buy for his benefactor. It is simple to setup, easy to configure and has the support of the aces at TurboHelpDesk.
My experiment with this software is Buy-Bob-A-Beer.com. I had it set up and ready to go in just a few hours and that included making up the graphics files for the header.
Buy Me a Drink is a PHP-based program that will run on any server with PHP installed. (PHP can be installed on UNIX, Windows and Mac OSX) It uses flat-files for data so it doesn’t require MySQL or any other kind of database setup.
You can have some real fun with this software. Two of my favorite Buy Me a Drink sites, other than Buy-Bob-A-Beer.com, are BuyJoelDessert.com from AdSense wizard Joel Comm and BuyBarbaraCoffee.com from Barbara J. Feldman.
Another appealing feature of this program is that anyone who “gives cheers” gets a mention in the “Cheers By” column with a link back to their website (and we know how [tag]Google[/tag] loves those incoming links). Sponsors get listed for a longer time without having to come back and do it again.
Another thing you’ll notice on the sites mentioned above is that they carry Google [tag]AdSense[/tag] advertising. Depending on the text on the site, that can include some pretty interesting links so that even a visitor that doesn’t want to “buy Bob a beer” can find something to click on.
Couple all of this with the ability to promote your own websites in the text of the page and you have a pretty good marketing tool that has a sense of humor.
All-in-all, I’d say this is some good, clean, inexpensive fun that could be bringing in new visitors for a long time to come. The Buy Me a Drink website can tell you all about it. Cheers!
Bob Stovall has been marketing on the Internet since 1991. Bob is the founder of BobStovall.com, a blog for Internet marketers, OrangeCat.net for Web Hosting Made Easy and is the Director of the Association of Real Estate Investment Professionals (AREIP.org).
You may reprint or distribute this article as long as you leave the content and the resource box at the end intact.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
