Referral Programs vs Affiliate Programs

July 24, 2020 | This post may include affiliate links. As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through these links, at no extra cost to you.

Let’s discuss the differences between referral programs and affiliate programs. Learn how to use these programs to get free stuff like free mobile service.

Resources

Mint Mobile

Key Points

Transcription provided as is by Otter

Hey, this is Arthur from ArthurCundy.com. Welcome. Today we’re going to talk about referral programs and affiliate programs. Are they the same? Are they different? Let’s get into it.

Alright, so referral programs versus affiliate programs. Now, here’s how I look at it, based on what I’ve seen out in the marketplace today. This is how they’re similar and this is how they’re different.

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So from what I can tell referral programs are for the average consumer. The average customer, the regular person who maybe doesn’t have a following, is not good at marketing and doesn’t have any experience or anything like that.

A lot of times companies will have both, they’ll have the referral program separate from the affiliate program. So what is the referral program? This is how sometimes it’ll work.

The referral program usually they’ll give you a little bit of money. They’ll say hey, refer a customer who will give you $20, or $15 or they’ll give you a discount on your product or service or will give you more of the service.

So for example, like Dropbox, when, when they were first getting started, they had this referral program where if you refer a friend, you got extra space in your account. And you know, you refer five friends you get, you know, that amount of space five times, right. So they grew very quickly because everyone wanted more space in their service. So if you have a great service and a great product, you know, you could have a referral program where you give, give, give someone you know, a little bit of extra or a little discount On their product or service for referring other people and bringing more people in.

So, and in the affiliate program is usually more robust, you’ll get more money, you’ll get more discounts and incentives, more benefits, more training, more support. And it’s usually just a, you know, a more enhanced version of the referral program. And usually, they’ll have two separate pages on the website where they fully explain what you get for each for each scenario, and so you can read through it I recommend to read through, you know, all the information. Sometimes it’s on the same page, but just read through everything and to fully understand what they’re offering and which one is the best for you.

So if you’re just starting out and you just want to get your feet wet, you just want to dabble in referring customers here and there. You can take part in the referral program, just to see how it is see what you’re you know, if you have a little audience or a little following, you can see, okay, you know is, is my audience receptive to this type of product or service, you can, you know, refer a few people see how it goes. And then you can move on to the affiliate program where, you know, they may have more stricter guidelines.

And so usually on the website, you’ll see referral program or they’ll have refer a friend or tell a friend or something like that. And the affiliate program we will usually say affiliate program or affiliates, or it’ll say partner program or something along those lines. So in usually it’s on the website, and it’s on the footer. So for an example, let’s take a look at Mint Mobile.

All right, here we are on Mint Mobile’s website. So you can see here 15 bucks a month. It’s a great phone service that I have. And they have both a referral program and an affiliate program.

So if you scroll down here on the website, all the way at the bottom, you’ll see they have two links here, refer a friend and become a partner.

So if you click on refer a friend here, you’ll see get a free year of service when you refer five friends. So you just refer five people and you get a free year of service.

Simply share your unique referral code, and when you get 5 people to join Mint, you, my friend, will have earned $240 of renewal credit to put toward your next plan renewal. That’s enough to get an entire year of our 8GB/mo plan for free. Oh, and don’t forget, each friend that signs up also gets a $15 renewal credit.

And it gives a little breakdown of okay you refer one you get $25, for two you get $30 for that person, you refer three, you get $35. So they have this each person you refer, you make a little bit more money, nd you get a free year.

So it kind of explains how it works, you know, to refer away so this is a great way if you have mobile service with Mint, which I do, and you refer others, you can get a free year of service and this is based on the 8GB plan. But if you choose a plan that is cheaper than that, then it could be even more than a free year of phone service.

This is how they have their refer a friend or referral program. Then there’s FAQs that you can go through and learn more about and then if you click become a partner, you’ll see how different this is.

This is Mint Mobile’s affiliate program. So you can see here that $20 commission on all orders. And if you go down, it fully explains how that all works.

Here are the qualification. So you’ll notice in the refer a friend program, the referral program, there wasn’t any qualifications in order for you to participate. I think the only qualification is that you need to be a customer so that you can get your phone service for free, obviously, right.

So that’s the only qualification if you’re going to use a service Anyway, you might as well tell a few friends and get a free and get free service here with the affiliate program or the partner program as they describe it. You should have a blog or website with 3,000 monthly visitors you need or have a YouTube or social channel with 5,000 followers. And you love telling people have clever stuff, right? And they have a link here that Oh, if you don’t have these qualifications Here’s a referral program that takes you back to the refer a friend page. And just kind of show you the highlights, you get $20 Commission on all orders, a 45 day cookie window.

So if you don’t know what a cookie is, is basically a little piece of code that is put on someone’s browser. And so if someone clicks on your link, you have 45 days to get paid. They’ll give you a unique coupon code where you know, instead of having the link, or you can have it in addition to the link, you’ll have a specific coupon where people put in the coupon code. And then that coupon is tagged to your account. So to make sure that you get that commission, and you’ll see here access our library of banners and text ads. So if you want to do marketing, if you want to do you know social media advertising and things like that, they have images and text ads for you to use. You have exclusive newsletters with special promotions. So if you have an email lists you can, you know, send out emails to your to your audience. But you also, I believe this is just you receiving emails newsletters from Mint Mobile, about special promotions that they have and news on the company. And then you know, reliable tracking and payouts and impact is an affiliate network that they’ve been a part of so and they kind of tell you how it works, you know, fill out the form, see if you’re a fit. tell everyone about men and get commission for every sale that you draw.

So the way that they’ve set it up is they have a tell a friend program, or referral program where it’s very simple to join, you just, you know, become a customer and they’ll give you a link right away and you can start sharing that with with your network. And if someone signs up, then you get free credit towards free service with the affiliate program with a partner program. They want these are for people who can drive a lot of sales really, really cool. Quickly, and so they provide more support more support. They’ll give you you know, $20 on on all new Commission’s people that you refer. And so there’s no limit to how many people you can refer. There’s only this 45 day window cookie, where someone clicks your link, and they buy within, you know, 45 days from now, you’ll still get that credit.

And so, so it’s a bit different. And what a lot of people do is they start off with the referral program. And once they get their feet wet, and they kind of learn the ropes and kind of knows who, who the best customers are to refer to Mint Mobile. Then they switch over to the affiliate program. And as long as they meet all these qualifications, they’ll be accepted and start earning $20 for each person that you refer. So a lot of companies split it up this way, and it’s good to know the differences between a referral program an affiliate program. So there you have it. Those are the differences between a referral program and an affiliate program.

If you’re just getting started, it might make sense to do the referral program, first, try out the service, the product, see if you like it, see if your audience responds to it. And then once you’ve set up a following, or feel confident that you can make, you know, more income using the affiliate program, then you switch over and go ahead and promote it that way.

Comment below, tell me which affiliate programs you like which referral programs that you’ve seen, that are pretty cool that you know, maybe you got something for free out of it? And let me know. All right. Talk to you soon.

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