The Power of Referring

April 6, 2007 Posted by Tyler Cruz

I’m happy. In fact, I’ve been in a happy mood all day partly due to the fact that I made $0.17!

Why am I excited about a measley 17 cents? I’m excited because I signed up my first referrer from PublisherSpot via our Casale Media Review. I haven’t begun to advertise it yet since I’m waiting for a couple more reviews first, so this is a nice surprise.

Various ad networks pay differently, and some don’t pay at all (no affiliate program), but Casale Media in particular pays out 5%.
What that means, obviously, is that I receive 5% of whatever the webmaster I refer makes from Casale Media. Again, some ad networks only pay a certain amount out for a fixed period of time, such as 6 or 12 months, but I contacted Casale Media and they have no limit (at the moment). What that essentially means it that I’ll be making 5% of whatever this webmaster makes for life. As long as he uses CasaleMedia and CasaleMedia doesn’t go under or change their policies, this will remain true.

Now you can start to understand why I’m excited about the $0.17. This was just the first day, but it can be expected that this particular webmaster isn’t going to bring in any big income. Simple math shows that he made $3.40 today, and even if he was just testing the ads on a smaller site, chances are he won’t be raking in any big dough anytime soon. But let’s first assume that this webmaster always makes $3.40 a day, never increasing it. That’s still $5 for me a month. That’s $60 a year. So now you can understand the value of referring somebody.

Now, I’m considering this webmaster a very low income earner, but let’s say over the span of a year I end up signing up and referring 100 of these small-time earners, making $0.17 from each of them per day. That’s $17 a day, $510 a month, or $6205 a year. A difference that should be noted here between earning money this way and via your own site is that you’re making this money for life, and while it can fluctuate and go up or down, that you’re not doing a single thing. You don’t even own a website or have to worry about updating a website or anything; all this revenue is purely made as soon as you sign somebody up.

Now, let’s say that 1 in every 10 people you sign up is a medium earner, making $50 a day. That’s $2.50 you’re making from a medium-earner per day, or $912.50 per year. This is where you can really be smart and start offering incentives for people to sign up, such as hard cold cash. Offering somebody you know that will make $50 a day from their website, $500 to sign up under you may not be such a bad deal, as you’ll be profiting after 6 months (assuming they stick with the ad network).

This is how poker marketers work. They offer poker players $100 in cash, for example, just to sign up under them. There are no strings attached. What’s different between poker and ad networks though, is that most poker sites offer affiliates tiered payout structures. For example, if they earn $10,000+ a month, they’ll receive 35%, if they earn $20,000+ they’ll receive 40%, etc. This creates a major snowball effect and which is why the larger the affiliate, the more they can offer to pay to get sign-ups’.

Take a look at the image below (Click on it to enlarge and view it properly):

I originally posted this way back in June. Back before the US Legislation had effectively banned online poker in the US, I was starting to make decent money as an affiliate. The above screenshot is an example of ONE player I signed up, and the stats from a 9-day period. You’ll see that he played medium-limits and raked $8k. That is the portion the poker room takes. I had a rakeback deal with the site and so I actually paid him 2.6k of that back, and I got to keep 5% of it for myself, at $408. Think about that. That’s $408 for 9-days, from ONE player. It’s too bad about the US legislation bill…

But that’s the power of referring.

Getting back to PublisherSpot, let’s say I sign up a big earner. One who makes $1,000 a day, and believe me these people are not as uncommon as you might think. There are TONS of people out there making $1,000+ easy. But let’s just say this person makes $1000 a day. That’s $50 a day for me, $1500 a month, or $18,000 a year.

Now let’s take the scenario, that after 1 year of running and advertising PublisherSpot that I sign up a total of 10 big-earners at $1000 a day. That would be $500 a day, $15,000 a month or $182,500 a year.

And just think. How hard is it really to refer webmasters through PublisherSpot? Oh, I’m sure it will be quite difficult and will be a long road ahead, but the potential of the site is enormous and perhaps now you can see why I’m so excited to see my first referral and my first $0.17 πŸ™‚

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Posted: April 6th, 2007 under Articles  

17 Responses to “The Power of Referring”

  1. mark says:

    that site needs a redesign

  2. Sam Sys says:

    I agree

  3. Techified says:

    Would have to agree with mark and sam, is a bit boring.

  4. Joshimitsu says:

    That’s great news tyler, passive income is the way to go!

  5. Martin says:

    I tried signing up for Casale, but I don’t think I meet the requirements for unique visitors a month.

    I was trying to get you so more easy money Tyler.

  6. Michelle says:

    Good luck with this. If it works out, that’s great.

    I have to agree with you when you say “it’s too bad about the US legislation bill…”. I started to make money as a 888 affiliate just before that came in, *sigh*.

    At least I feel good about not endorsing gambling anymore πŸ˜‰

  7. Chris M says:

    Congrats – I’m heading over to take a look!

  8. Martin says:

    So what is the deal with online poker? I used to play a ton, but I stopped once my first kid came.

    Can you not play at all online or what?

  9. You can play, but you can’t cash in or out with a US account.

  10. ToddW says:

    I’m sure you know it sounds good on paper but refering even 1 $1000 a day earner is near impossible let alone 10. I’m going to guess the majority of your referrals will be $10 a day or less. So even if you refer 100 of those you still don’t make to much money.

    Also look what happened to Fastclick/Valueclick Media after how ever many years they up and decide to not offer the % for lifetime. It would really SUCK to go from $10k a month in passive $ from a referral to $0 πŸ™

    I’m not saying not to do the site I’m just saying I wouldn’t expect to get 100’s of signups πŸ˜‰

    As far as the design, I thought it looked fine? LOL.

  11. he design looks good enough to me … but then I tend to be a minimalist … some of the absolutely most profitable sites on the ‘net are often called “ugly”. The webmasters just roll with the comments and, as Liberace used to say, “Cry all the way to the bank”.

    I would suggest, though, that there is too little contrast in the color scheme … looking at it with a low-end Tosh laptop it’s not very easy to read …. old eyes, I know.

    @ ToddW, your comments ring true except that it almost sounds as if you are mired in the pessimism that tends to paralize many og us (yes, I include me).

    Tyler _may_ not sign up as many larger earners as he thinks, the various companies _may_ reduce payouts, etc., etc. … but for that matter any of us _may_ get run over by a bus tomorrow.
    The site has a great business model … I can’t think of a single one that competes with it now, it’s diversified, no one ad network can ‘crash’ the business model and most of all it provides a really useful service … something many sites do not do … my 2 cents, anyway.

  12. Michelle says:

    ToddW – we pretty much had that happen. Over 1000 visitors a day to one of our old sites, and just a few sign ups through our main ads – for a targeted ‘pay per subscriber’ affiliate program.

    Unfortunately none of them were big, or repeat spenders. Of the 26 signups, we made just over $6 total! Ah well, they *could* have been big spenders…

  13. fry says:

    Instead of dreaming about what would happen if you sign up 87 people that earn $1950 every 2 and a half days you should get back to work, no wonder you only manage to work for 2 hours each day!

  14. Yeah, I think this is something to celebrate when you’ve made $1000. Celebrating after $0.17 seems a bit premature.

  15. Dan says:

    fry, he’s earning enough to live comfortably so I don’t think he needs to dream. Pessimism is exactly what kills so many good ideas. An idea that took me around 3 hours to program and no work gets more visitor than a site thats been up for years.

  16. fry says:

    So what? I earn twice as much and don’t spend my time dreaming about “what if”

  17. […] 10 days after my $0.17 post with only 1 referrer, I’m now at $9.10 and 16 […]

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