Show HN: Promotioner - Allow your readers to pay with clicks | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Promotioner - Allow your readers to pay with clicks

promotioner.com

15 pointsankeshk24 comments

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.

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.

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.

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."

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?

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!

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.

Don't be an asshole.

I'm not, it's a lame ass idea. There isn't even a demo on the page. Plus, you'll get penalized by Google once they catch on. Scammers gonna scam.

Wanna make extra cash in your spare time working from home?

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.

They offer a username alternative: (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.)

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.)

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.

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.)

(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.

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).

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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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