"Just ask 2 of your friends to visit:
http://Promotioner.com/viral/?u=yourname@email.com
and you will receive the report "5 Elements of a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign" for free in your email."
That said, I think there's a lot of room for improved, dead simple referral systems, and I'm glad to see another one enter the fray.
ALL of the top 500 ecommerce websites have their own referral or affiliate programs. None of the top blogs have their own referral program. And thats because there was no dead simple way of referring blogs yet.
We plan to change that. Launching with reward-for-clicks as our MVP. Will introduce pay-per-sale referral model soon.
Google hasn't shown any harshness to referral programs yet. But even then, we're not going to focus on SEO part a lot. We consider it a side benefit. And it'll have just 1 line on our sales page.
I think most people would be pretty wary of adding their email address to a link and posting publicly. Especially on a strange site they dont know about.
This second option could lead to spam worries. Thats why, we offer optional usernames. The first time our system recognizes a new email id, an email is sent out to them with instructions on setting up a username with which they can replace their email id while promoting URLs.
(Also, we'll be launching social media integration buttons next week, which will automatically shorten the URLs and disguise your email ids.)
Promotioner is a lean rebranding effort to focus more on the site-wide referral idea, and less on the all-in-one ecommerce + mailing list + referral program tool.
It would help focus people on quality over quantity.
Quick thought: You would get a lot more users by testing difference bases(reducing the 15 to something really small, like 5). Feels like more people would do it, you would get more than 5 anyways, and the the exponential gains outweighs the difference in the base.
(I had kept the milestone at 15 clicks as a comparison to $3. But you're right, lower base doesn't matter if it can increase the number of people who start sharing.)
I would make this the default. Exposing addresses like that is begging for your users to be spearfished.
Allowing people to refer any URL without signing up, simply by adding their email id at the end of the URL seems to be working better in increasing web traffic.
Its a trade off. But its a decision taken because the pay off is worth it (till now. If a lot of users say otherwise, then will switch it).
