

Show HN: Promotioner - Allow your readers to pay with clicks - ankeshk
http://Promotioner.com

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morisy
Looks like an interesting idea, but I'd be extremely wary of signing up for
any site that rewards users for helping boost your SEO with inbound links.
Google has traditionally been pretty harsh on anything resembling linkbuying,
and these incentives seem to blur that line.

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.

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ankeshk
Thanks Michael. The long term idea is to bring the idea of referral marketing
to blogs and CMS systems.

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.

~~~
morisy
Thanks. That one line just stood out as a red flag to me on what looked like
an otherwise very compelling product - anything that I think could even hint
at a Google penalty is sort of a non-starter.

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1monthlater
Internet marketing garbage. Alas, tis the fate of HN.

 _"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."_

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ankeshk
Thanks for your comment. I'm at a loss as to how to respond. I'm show casing
my startup that is a referral marketing app. Of course, the demo that I set up
for it will be about referral marketing too, no?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Don't worry about it, a lot of techies are just grumpy about the very idea of
marketing, because they think the world would be a better, purer place without
it. They're obviously wrong. Carry on!

~~~
supjeff
Those same idealist techies who hate marketing are the ones who wrote all that
wonderful FOSS that these marketing hacks use day-in-and-day out to make the
web a shittier place.

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redslazer
Why does it require me to put my email address on the end of it for a reward.
Considering that for anyone to get any real benefit out of it the links
(containing the email address) would have to be posted publicly. Just seems
like a huge spam magnet.

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.

~~~
ankeshk
We had to make a choice: go with a signup form which leads to fewer referrals.
Or automatically sign people up when they add their email id at the end of
"any" page on your domain to increase adoption rate and get more people to
promote you.

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.)

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stopachka
Awesome idea.

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.

~~~
ankeshk
Thanks for your comment. Good idea. Made the change and lowered the barrier to
5 clicks.

(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.)

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sp332
_(And yes, for folks who don't want to show their email address in the URL due
to spam worries, they can replace their email address with a unique
username.)_

I would make this the default. Exposing addresses like that is begging for
your users to be spearfished.

~~~
ankeshk
Thanks. Creating a username requires people to signup. Signing up = friction.
And makes fewer people promote you.

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).

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lewispb
The logo looks nice, not sure about the heavy black colour scheme though and I
have to say that the headline font looks positively ghastly.

~~~
ankeshk
Thanks for your feedback. Any suggestions on a replacement font?

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ckluis
very similar to successnexus - but, they have a very good blog going as well.

~~~
ankeshk
We're the same guys actually. Promotioner is owned by SuccessNexus :)

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.

~~~
ckluis
I thought something was up. I like the concept. I've considering trying a SEO
contest based on the number of senders or even paying linkbuilders this way.

It would help focus people on quality over quantity.

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zupreme
I like what you are doing here. You're turning ordinary people into a
marketing team for website owners. This is one of those "Why didn't I think of
this!" ideas. Kudos.

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kartikr
:)

