FINAL STATS:

The difference between "wouldn't it be nice" theory, sales pitches and reality.

An important (though somewhat common sense) lesson was learned.

With so many people importing friends and having emails go out cold, a LOT of those receivers will click "spam". Since that email had your domain in it, your domain gets blacklisted at rocket pace which not only entirely kills the TAF system (as all future invites are blocked or sent directly to the Spam box), but it also hurts any affiliates who still promote links directly instead of cloaking them (like they should).

In fact, your communciations to your own leads using that domain are also shot.

Case in point... take a look at the final stats.

Visitors : invitations sent : new traffic
249 : 51 : 1

Those are just ratios...

But for every 249 raw visitors, 51 invitations were mailed (not bad) but only 1 new free visitor resulted. So for every 249 visitors, we got 1 free visitor ...

Weigh that against how many potential sales were lost seeing as this Viral script resulted in the domain being blacklisted.

So why the comparison to "Gmail, Facebook, MySpace" etc using this? Those are social networks. It's an entirely different psychology vs. promoting a free report or a sale or anything of the sort. Additionally, each of those companies has a department that specifically makes sure they stay whitelisted (is that something you want to deal with?).

My experience with this and past TAF has been less than favourable. See, if it REALLY works (and a lot of TAF invites are being sent out), then you get blacklisted. ANd if it doesn't really work, it's hardly worth the extra time to set up... and, more importantly, hardly worth using up valueable real estate for a TAF form and instructions and bonuses.

Anyways... at the end of this particular campaign the stats show that it took 249 visitors to create 1 new free visitor and the main reason for this is because that domain (for the temporary sale) is now heavily black-listed because thousands (literally) received random invitations as their names were imported into the TAF.

I won't be running a 3rd test. Draw your own conclusions.