20,000 referrals!
That's pretty good and up 1,000 since May 1st so thanks so much to all who have participated this year. Unfortunately, I could write out the names of the participants and thank them individually with far less words than I will actually use in this post! Still in our first year of the PSW Report we now have over 20,000 Email subscribers. Thank you so much to Members who referred their friends to Free Trial Newsletter Subscriptions using this very simple member link.
Amazingly, even with the incentive of locking in either a bonus 20% discount or a Free Newsletter Subscription through next quarter for referring just ONE person, many people did not refer anyone. I saw the movie "UP" with my kids last year and, if that grouchy old man can make a friend, I'm sure you guys can find one too – so I'm going to give everyone a second chance this month to earn their bonus 20% discount by referring 5 people to our FREE EMail Newsletter.
My goal is to get 50,000 people on the newsletter list. OK, actually my real goal is to get 100,000 but we'll start with 50,000 and work from there! If you are a newsletter subscriber, this affects you too as the free trial subscription lasts 3 months but you can keep it FREE by referring another person. All that is required is your friend's name and EMail address put in the little box and, like magic (if you can accomplish this feat 5 consecutive times) you will save 20% on your next renewal (if you haven't already gotten the bonus discount of course) or extend your FREE newletter subscription. The person you are sending the newsletter to must "Opt In" (accept your invitation). Once they do, you'll see the credits right on your member page. This is IN ADDITION to any other discounts you already have on our new system (which also gives members a discount based on time as a member).
Members are already seeing the benefits of expanding our subscriber base, we have been able to build new relationships, bring in more writers and enter into arrangements like our new reports from the Value Walk with regular reports from from OpTrader, etc. Our plan is working perfectly – we are building up subscribers and bringing on great new services but we have to keep it going so please – refer a friend this week!
The idea behind this program is very simple. We have historically seen about 1% of our Free Newsletter members convert each month, which is pretty good but that's because we don't go out shotgunning for subscribers. Generally, our subscribers pretty much come in organically through search engines or referrals from other web sites, where they've seen enough of our free stuff to want to become members. As you know, we rarely push for subscribers as 1% a month is a good amount so we figure the best thing to do is simply get more people reading our daily posts and that will, naturally, bring more people in.
That being the case, the best people to bring more people in are the people who are already in. We have instituted a program that rewards members for simply telling other people about our site. What we're doing is giving all members the ability to refer a friend to the PSW Newsletter for FREE, at which point they, in turn can extend their free subscription by referring someone else.
Your member name is their "coupon code" and allows them to have a 20% discount on a Memberships. This is automatically tracked if you use your member link to sign them up. Each PSW Report Member you refer (that remains active) will give you a 0.5% discount on your next renewal. So, very simply, 200 referrals = a free membership (up to $249 off per month), no matter what level you are at. I have now made this even easier as you now have a box in your account profile where you can simply put in your friend's name and EMail and – DONE!
Let's say you refer 100 people over the course of a year to PSW Reports. That would knock 70% off your own subscription price right away. If, by the end of a year, just 12 of them became members (1% per month) at an average of $150 a month, that would be $1,800 and you would get another (at 20%) $360 montly credit. If you are a premium member, your $249 membership would have been cut to $74.70 (70% off) on your Report referrals and the additional $285 PER MONTH would be a net credit to you. We intend to pay overages quarterly but, as I said, we're experimenting right now so we'll see how it goes.
It may not seem like much but it's a very powerful thing because of the bonus referrals. Let's say the 12 people you refer who become members also refer 100 people each and have similar conversions to paying members under them – that would mean that each of them would get $261 a month as well and 12 x $261 is $3,132 and you get a 30% override on that for an additional $940 a month. See – it gets interesting!
If however, someone were to be more aggressive and found not only 10 people a month to refer us to but also found 1 person a month to actually be a member, at the end of year 1 they'd have 24 members at (guessing) $150 average, which is $3,600 a month so 20% of that = $720 a month of direct commissions and if those 144 referrals generate just $49 a month each on average from their own referrals (the cost of a PSW Report Membership), that would be $7,056 a month and your 30% bonus would be $2,116.80/month plus the $720 direct = $32,840.60 a year. Not a bad outcome for finding 10 people a month to refer us to! Our 1% per month conversion is pretty steady so there's no reason to think it won't improve your count the next year as well (you would still have 88% left who haven't subscribed), even if you stop adding new referrals of your own. Of course, for any member you bring in who is motivated and generates commissions like this – you will earn almost $10,000 per year as your 30% bonus override!
We've worked very hard to get the newsletter and alert system up and running, and we are going to be making more changes in the site in the summer of 2010. I've been speaking to other services who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers for these things and they tell me it's just a matter of marketing. Their system of marketing is to advertise all over the place and just hope some of the memberships stick. We have a more direct relationship with our members and I'd rather try to keep things "in the family" as I figure who better to promote PSW than our own members?
So we're been testing this program for a year and it's doing great bt we could be doing much better. I think I have already proven that we don't need to hook up with one of the major services just to build our membership base and I'm much happier giving the people who are already here a chance to save money and make referral revenues, rather than giving it all to strangers. Also, it provides the great public service of us not having to use bulk EMailers to look for subscribers. Hopefully this program puts us directly in touch with other people who you know who would also have an interest in hearing about the markets on a daily basis.
In summary, it's a simple system:
- As a member you can go to your account login screen where you'll see the "Refer a Friend" box.
- This is also the screen that let's you and your friends manage EMail and Alert preferences.
- This is also the screen that tracks all your referrals and commission bonuses.
- This is also the screen that tracks your own discounts earned against current rates.
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This is also the screen that lets members upgrade from one type of membership to another.
- If you have a friend who wishes to sign up for Basic or Premium Membership straight away – your login name is their coupon code.
That's it! Hardly worth the bullet points as everything is right on one page for you! There is just one more thing – you can send the link http://www.philstockworld.com/subscribe/ to any non-member (if you don't want to just sign them up for a newsletter yourself) and that will give them basic information about the site as well as a chance to see me in action following the link to my Livestock broadcast. It's useful as I explain the buy/write strategy in the first 10 minutes.
You can also send someone a link that automatically makes you the referrer by using the following URL:
http://www.philstockworld.com/membership/signup.php?coupon_or_referrer= AND, after the = sign append your PSW login name. This is something that has been used by people who have a blog or large list of people who may be interested and we can give you technical support if you fall into that category. If you have a blog and wish to make that a link in, that is fine with us.
This is definitely a work in progress and I'll try to clarify the post based on what questions we get but let's see how it goes as it's a really fun Web 2.0 experiment in viral marketing vs. the bulk Emailing and Affiliate Marketing programs the big boys rely on.
Thanks for all your efforts,
– Phil
