By : Nidhi Gupta

Referral programs are a brilliant viral marketing strategy because of their explosive growth potential. There are many kinds of referral programs, but they all are systems of benefits for service users that recruit new users. The benefits are sometimes cash, or commissions, sometimes account upgrades.

The explosive growth comes from the fact that each referred user may become a referrer himself. Assuming just five active users are referred by each user; a single user will end up recruiting 3905 users (five to the power of five) after five levels.

Referral Programs as a Marketing Strategy

Exponential growth is a good reason to create a referral program to market a service. The potential to grow is so enormous that everyone should at least try it. This is also a form of viral marketing, since users are doing the actual marketing work. The advertiser does not need to do anything once the ball gets rolling.

The important thing to keep in mind, when launching a new referral program is that most of the users should be of the type that will refer others. This is effectively used in the Get Paid To market, where users, who are trying to earn money online, are likely to try the referral program to add to their revenue.

Another related issue is that the program needs to have enough incentive. If the gains are not high enough, the referral program will not get enough attention. Ways to make it more appealing without risking too much money include adding multiple referral levels, and giving a percentage commission from recurring sales. The potential gain for the referrer is so much higher for these kinds of programs that they are very likely to get noticed.

Potential for Referring

If you have a large network of online contacts, referral programs are a good way to monetize it. When recruiting other it is important to have a good idea of the service through using it yourself first. Then an honest review of it may convert long term users.

The programs to choose are the ones, which offer multiple levels of referral commission, because you also benefit from the exponential growth of the downline. Also those programs with recurring commission instead of a flat referral fee have more potential in the long run.

It is important to choose referral programs with the correct theme to market. If you are marketing them in your blog, or a website, choose ones that fit the theme. Otherwise readers will rarely be interested. It is important to use all channels at your disposal, when you market a program. Don’t just stick with a blog post, but contact any email and IM contact that might be interested.

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By : Admin

Link building strategies have, for most people for a long time, revolved around reciprocal link exchanges. Whilst most people understand that links are important, they generally don’t understand why this is so. In a nutshell, a link to your site has traditionally been accepted by Search Engines as a vote for your site. A link from a topic or theme-related site to yours is better than a link from a site having a completely different topic. An important site’s link to yours carries more weight.

All the thinking webmasters worked diligently to build links in order to subvert the search engine rankings and gain an advantage to themselves at the expense of everyone else. Google simply don’t approve of willy-nilly link-building schemes, and have recently tightened the screws a bit more, in two notable ways.

Bad Links

Some links are bad. For example, if you are a car sales company and you’ve got dozens of completely irrelevant links to international hotel sites. These links are nothing but useless crap. These links are going to help you in no way!

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal links are still of some value, providing the link titles are explicit, and if the page they link to you from has a higher Page Rank than the page from which you link to them. The concept of a link to you being a vote for you, and being added to your sites Total Vote Count has a flip side. A link from you to someone else essentially deducts one vote from your total vote count… meaning its value is minimal when compared to a 1-way incoming back-link!

One-Way Outward Links

You’ll be hemorrhaging Page Rank with nothing in return! Do it, but be smart about it, because there is nothing to be gained by you from linking to any site that does not link back. So make sure your links include the “nofollow” attribute that tells Search Engine’s that the link is not a vote by your site for that site!

Link Content

This is mission critical because Google and others have decided that they can’t trust you to be honest about your site! Google decided that it is essential that there is some external correlation between what you say your site is about, and what other people say your site is about. This is done by analyzing the words in the Link Title on all links pointing to your site. Bottom line here is - if a keyword phrase does not appear on links to your site, you will not rank for that phrase!

For many established sites, this is the main reason they might have experienced a noticeable decline in rankings in the last few months. Older sites will have a majority of incoming links based on their business name, and not on their activities / products / services / location etc.

Backlink analysis reveals this shortcoming rather quickly and it is possible to remedy this by building 1-way incoming back-links using multiple Title or Description combinations that contain a good spread of relevant keywords. It does require some keyword research, and it is tedious - but if you don’t do it, you are certainly not going forwards, however, your competitors might be.

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