Ask Bob The Teacher

Today’s lesson is about growing your list of subscribers and customers without spending huge amounts of money on advertising.

The way I’ve grown my business is by letting my current clients recommend my sites to other people, and then rewarding them for doing so. In fact, I estimate that 80% of my subscribers and customers came to me at some point from someone else’s recommendation (which is over 16,000 people!).

Of course, we’d all like to think that when you make something great, others will want to tell people about it just because.

And that does happen.

But a little incentive can go a long way! Let me explain…

I like to pay my members for making referrals when my newest customers buy something from me. On average when a person (who now becomes an affiliate) sends me 10-15 people, at least one of their referrals buys something from me. I then give that affiliate 20-91% of the sale.

A money-based affiliate program is not something you want to do manually. Keeping track of who comes from where is pain, and you’ll have a lot of angry affiliates if you don’t track people correctly.

Personally, I use Butterfly Marketing software on almost all of my sites. It keeps track for me so at the end of the month I get a single file to send to Paypal for the commissions. Of course, there are a lot of other reasons I use that software that will have to wait for another day. But its definitely my top pick for long term affiliate management.

If you want to go the free (or nearly free) route, then you can get much of the affiliate tracking features of Butterfly Marketing out of PayDotCom. Both were created by Mike Filsaime, and PayDotCom is growing like crazy. You can sell one product on PDC for free, and you pay a $1- $3 fee on each transaction out of the profits. At the end of the month, you get the Paypal file from PDC, and you’re all set. (Selling more than 1 product is just $29 for life for as many products as you want).

As you can imagine, money is a great prize.

But you can also reward people with free gifts, such as a bonus product or upgraded membership.

Again, I use Butterfly Marketing to do this sometimes. There’s a feature where you can give someone an upgraded membership after so many referrals. At Squidoo Secrets I do this, for example. If a free member sends me 5 referrals, I upgrade them to the next level, which gives them higher commission rates and a bonus product.

There have been a number of attempts to create a Tell-A-Friend script that does this for you as well, where if somebody refers a certain number of people, they get a bonus download from you.

The trouble with many of these scripts is they run off your server and setting them up is less than easy.

Recently, Matthew Glanfield (no stranger to Affiliate Marketing strategies, that’s for sure) created a system that does this, and you don’t have to host it yourself. It’s called Your Tell-A-Friend, and you can actually use it for free (although I recommend the premium membership).

How does it work? Well, you create your tell-a-friend page using Matthew’s step-by-step wizard, and decide how many referrals you want someone to make in order to get a gift. You provide the website address of the gift (which could technically be any page, including an affiliate product free download site), and Matthew’s system does the rest.

You may have heard about how some Tell-A-Friends allow you to import contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.? Matthew’s system does that as well if you want it to (premium members only), which can quickly accelerate your growth if you use it wisely. Instead of referring just 3-5 people, they can refer 50, 100, 200 or more people.

Regardless of which method you choose, having other people spread the word about what you are doing is an essential part of growing your business without spending cash on advertising. Just implement a system that does it on autopilot for you.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Not sure which to start with? I’d say go with Your Tell-A-Friend first (the premium membership pay for itself quickly), and grab a free account at PayDotCom (watch for a special bonus offer though from Mike). With the extra money you make, pick up Butterfly Marketing down the road.

p.p.s. Have you had success with either of these three systems? Tell me about it below…