Congratulations to Corey Rosenbloom at Afraid to Trade.
He is the proud owner of $1,000 in cash for referring new member MasterBlaster to a free trial of our newsletter in July, who will also get $500 – just for trying us out!
Thanks to all of you who participated in this contest but we won't be doing it again as we had LESS referrals by members in July than either of the previous months. Clearly you guys are much to rich for a mere $1,000 prize to motivate you to enter a name and Email address in our Referral Box. Our affiliates, on the other hand, have been going like gangbusters and I'm very proud to announce that, after 4 months of running our referral experiment, we now have 6,600 people reading the PSW Report!
Why are the affiliates so motivated? It's the math. As I mentioned in the original post, it's the simple math of the thing. If an affiliate already has a list of 1,000 members and signs them up for a free trial subscription and just 10 of those people (1%) sign up for a premium membership at the regular price of $249, then that affiliate gets $500 PER MONTH in commissions (20%). It's that easy!
We already have people who are effectively sales people for PSW, just going around and gathering names for referrals from such places as graduate and business schools, chamber of commerce members, large white-collar companies and various clubs and other social networks they already belong to. If you happen to know people who know people who happen to need an income – all they have to do is contact someone and say "Hey, would you like to try out a stock newsletter for no cost and no obligation?" If the person answers yes, all they have to do next is enter their contact's name and Email address and they are done. We track everything else and if that person converts to memberships, they get a check.
Given our current rate of growth, I expect to get to our 10,000 reader goal this month and that's fantastic, but we can do much better. Barry Rhitholtz has 80,000 newsletter subscribers and we need to catch up. Since you not only get a referral fee for the people who directly sign up under you but also a 30% bonus on any fees they generate, there is an opportunity here for people who know how to market to make a fairly large amount of money.
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.
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This is also the screen that tracks your own discounts earned against current rates.
- Every member has the ability to give themselves discounts through referrals.
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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.
If you sign up 100 people and just 10 of them become Premium members, that's $500 per month. If those 10 people also end up signing up 100 people and generate $500 a month each, your 30% bonus on their referral fees would be $1,500 additional dollars a month – that's $24,000 a year. Even if you are so wealthy that it's not worth going through your own Rolodex for "just" $24,000 a year – surely you know a college student who is in school with 30,000 people, some of whom may be interested in business or may have parents who are…
1% of 30,000 is 300 and 300 times $50 is $15,000 a month and that's $180,000 a year without even counting any potential bonus fees. If you know someone who might be motivated, you can just sign them up and tell them to do the same or you can contact Greg and I and we'll be happy to go over the program in more detail. 6,600 is very good for 4 months but I'm sure we can do much better in the last month of the summer. I really think we can do very well if we go through the colleges, especially business schools.
Thanks,
– Phil
