Guide - How to get Referrals

Okay so you signed up to a load of money making sites, which I hope includes the 12 above, and making slow progress only earning cents each day! Not impressed? Well you shouldn't be but like I said before the golden rule is 'referrals are king.'

Basically if you don't start getting referrals your unlikely to get anywhere with these sites - though the pay to sign-up sites pay out pretty big for some offers. But how do you go about getting these referrals, especially if you have relatively few friends like me. Well hopefully the following 10 steps will get you on your way and soon the referrals should be flooding in!

1. First thing first you need a blog or website - such as this one - to advertise your links. In fact feel free to copy this one but if you do, please out of courtesy enter 'thepreacherman' in any referrer field when you sign up to one of these websites - if you email me at suckonthepreacherman@hotmail.com I will send you all the HTML of my blog so you can edit it with your own referral links. You must have a list of your referral links hosted somewhere online for others to click on. I personally think a blog on here is the best option.

Also be mindful of your blog's / website's description as this is the primary criteria that Google will use when matching your site to the search criteria entered and you should therefore try to include in it all the keywords you want a Google search to match upon.

2. Email the link to your blog / website to all the friends you have and encourage them to join in. Of course if you have a lot of friends you might not need to bother with the other steps but to really make an income you will need over 200 referrals for each site and I don't know many people with over 200 friends!

3. Get your blog / website listed on Google. This you will find is not as easy as it should be as Google's crawler has very awkward criteria - number of links to your blog / website from other sites - to include your URL and never guarantees it. I would recommend trying the following 5 things to get listed on Google:

- Submit your URL directly to the Google crawl engine. This is done by going to the Google Add URL page and submit your URL via the form

- Get a link to your site on another URL that is already listed by Google. How you go about doing this really depends on the contacts you have but I would suggest getting in touch with someone who runs a blog / website with similar contents to yours and can be found via Google search, and offer to have a link to their site on yours if they do the same for you

One way to do this is to post a new thread on the Blog Catalog in the Blog Promotions group, which goes something like this: LINK EXCHANGE - if you post a link to my blog on your blog I will return the favour

- Probably the best method is to submit your URL to the Yahoo! Directory and / or the Open Directory Project, which is owned by Netscape

- I have recently come across the following site, which states that for 120 days it will list you for free as the top result of 40 search engines based on 5 keywords. It has not worked for me yet but as it is free, it is worth a try:
1on40

- Carry out the 6 othe steps of this posting and then try to re-submit your URL to Google as these subsequent steps should actually increase the number of links to your blog as well

There is, however, no 100% method and you basically just have to be patient with this one, and keep submitting your URL daily / weekly until it appears. To easily check if your blog / website is listed on the Google simply search Google for your URL - if it returns no results it is not listed. There are of course other search engines aside from Google - MSN, Yahoo - but none of them are as well known or as heavily used so I would primarily focus your efforts on getting a Google listing

Once you are listed on Google, however, you should continue to try and build up your blog's / website's link count as this will improve your google ranking, which will mean your blog / website will appear earlier on in any matching search results

4. Create a small ad campaign for a few dollars. Yes you will have to spend a little here but it is worth it and if you use in particular Clix Sense, which costs (number of clicks * click price) + 20% commission e.g. $12 for a 1000 clicks at $0.01 per click, you will get guaranteed website / blog traffic that can also be tailored to reflect your site contents. I would also strongly advise if you do use such a Clix Sense campaign to restrict the advert to premium users only.

Though I would strongly recommend first using Clix Sense, other good sites you can use for an ad campaign are:
Matrix Mails - Adverts are paid for via coins, which you either buy via your online earnings for $0.40 each, via PayPal / E-gold for $0.50 each, or through a membership upgrade. Each coin equates to 70 targeted clicks and campaigns can be finely tuned to a specific audience
Easy Ad Bucks - Offers various packages such as $7 for 2500 10 second adverts
Financial Freedom Ads - Costs the same as Clix Sense and will reach a large user base, though not as large as Clix Sense

5. If you have created a blog, which is what I recommend you do, I would advise getting them listed on some blog directories. Not only will this increase the publicity for your blog, but it will improve your chances of being accepted for a number of free blog advertising sites, such as Blogsvertise, that have entry criteria. Some blog directories you could get your blog listed on are:
Blog Directory
Blog Top List
Best of the Web Blogs - A great site to get listed on but has a one time review fee of $49.95
EatonWeb Blog Directory - Charges an annual review of $34.99 to get listed
Bloghub.Com
Blog Rankings - This site charges a small fee of approximately $0.13 per directory that you wish to list your blog in
Blog Announce - This site charges between $6.95 - $16.95 depending on the links you want
Blog Listings
Spicypage
Bloggernity
Blogarama - A professional site with over 65,000 listings but I found the permitted blog's description length of 10-200 characters quite restrictive
Blog Search Engine - A very selective blog directory, which you may struggle to get listed on unless you also get yourself listed on the Eaton Web Blog Directory
Globe of Blogs

6. Post the link to your blog / website on as many social networking and free forum sites you know - especially forum sites that are primarily to discuss making money online. Some good sites to post your blog link on are, though be aware some of these forums might delete your posting due to it containing an advertisement:
Facebook
Bebo
DreamTeamMoney Forum
Sitepoint Forums
Money Fan Club Forum
MoneyMakerGroup Forum
Offtopic.com - this is a general forum for discussing everything and anything but it is massive so worth plugging you blog / website on
Get Paid HWY Forum
GPT Point
Talk Gold
Digg - you can post your list of referrals on to this very popular site for even more publicity

7. Advertise your blog / website on as many free advertising sites as possible - and if your wondering how they can be free they work on the principle that you advertise sites on your blog / website and others will advertise yours on theirs. Here is a list of some of the biggest to get you started and note that the majority of these are primarily to advertise blogs and not websites
AdLeaf
AdGridwork
Blogsvertise
UK Banner Exchange
Banner Surge - Note you will need an online banner for your website / blog to use this one
125 Exchange
Zimbio
Gimme Links - if you have a website of the format www.[website name].htm this is a very useful site for getting free links from other sites to your site
Link Exchange and Review
Gimme4free - requires you to add funds to your account to cover your advertising campaign

8. There are a small number of sites out there that are designed to aid you in getting referrals, either by advertising your referral link for free or by allowing you to earn referrals through accepting other users referrals - these sites operate much like the GPT sites but rather than earning cash, you are earning referrals.
Star Referrals - well presented site where you earn stars through either signing up to other users referrals or clicking on ads, and these stars can be exchanged for referral ads
GetRef - another site where you can earn credits to buy referral ads
LinkReferral - a site where you can advertise your link referrals for free and your daily activity improves the ranking of your link

9. Create more than one blog / website with your links on and repeat steps 2 - 8. Other good sites to create free blogs / websites are:
Squidoo - this is a fairly unique site where you create something called a 'lens', which is basically like a blog
MySpace
Google Sites - an excellent site for creating and hosting a free website and very straightforward to use
WordPress - another very popular free blog site
Yahoo 360 Blog

10. If none of the above steps work in getting you the referrals you want / need then you can always take advantage of the various referral facilities offered by the sites you are referring to. for example:
Financial Freedom Ads offer a 'Buy Referrals' option through which you can purchase referrals - prices range from $22.95 for 20 referrals to $472.62 for 500
Easy Ad Bucks will get referrals for you if you upgrade to their Pro Membership for $20.88 / $20.98 depending on how you pay
Neobux allow you to rent referrals - users that have a subscribed without entering a referrer will be referred to you for the rental period - and they charge for a month's rental from $3 for 10 to $30 for 100

There are other things you can try such as paying for blog / website traffic through the likes of Buy Website Traffic and Cheap Web Traffic but this is something I personally have not tried so cannot comment on the quality of the results or the credibility of the companies

Remember 'referrals are king' and the more you flood the internet with your referral links, the more chance you have of reaching a point where you earn enough of these websites to supplement - or even replace! - your income. Good luck and no spamming!