If you already know how referrals work, you can skip this section and get right to the referrals (see the links on top of the banner above). However, if you've never done referrals before, you may be a bit confused. This is the five-cent tour of how it works.
The idea behind referrals is very simple: customers are valuable to companies. People who reliably buy Fords are valuable to Ford; people who bank at Chase are valuable to Chase (even if they don't always act like it). Companies spend money to acquire new customers, whether this is through marketing, advertising, sponsorships, or whatever. Not surprisingly, one pretty effective way of winning new customers is to say "here's some money, if you'll be our customer."
This relatively recent development in marketing is known as referral marketing. A company - say, Hotel Tonight, an Internet startup that finds discount hotel rooms for people looking at the last minute - will create a program to let their existing customers refer friends to Hotel Tonight. These offers almost always come with some sort of premium - in this case, the person signing up gets a $25 discount on their first booking.
Why would the existing Hotel Tonight customer tonight do this? Well, one, because Hotel Tonight really is a great app that can save you a lot of money if you rent hotel rooms even semi-occasionally. But two, and more directly, because just like they're paying the new customers to give them a shot, they pay the existing customer to do a little marketing outreach. (I make some money on this site in just this way.)
How does this work out in practical terms? It's pretty easy. Hotel Tonight will give me, its loyal customer, a special code (it's RHAYES19) and ask me to hand this code around. If a new customer signs up at Hotel Tonight and uses RHAYES19, then they will get $25 off their first hotel booking, AND Hotel Tonight will put a credit for $25 on my account.
You can see why I call this free money; although the process of signing up and creating an account does take a little bit of time, it's time you'd have put in anyway - and for giving Hotel Tonight a shot, between us we collect (or in this case save) fifty bucks.
All of the referrals on this site have two things in common.
1. They are reliable, reputable, legitimate companies, whose products I have personally installed and used, or whose services I either actively use, or have investigated and approve of. I'm not all-knowing but I don't recommend garbage.
2. They offer useful services or valuable products. Not every referral here is right for every person, but this is a no-crap zone.
If you ever suspect that a program or company I have referred is being dishonest, misrepresenting themselves, or otherwise behaving objectionably, please contact me and let me know of your concern so that I can investigate and get them off my page. Thank you!
Using the referrals on this page is straightforward:
1. You sign up for a company's service or product and take whatever concrete step(s) they require. (Sometimes all they want is for you to open an account. Sometimes it's a bit more involved, like providing information or making a small deposit with them. I avoid referrals that ask for significant commitments but don't give significant rewards.)
2 You collect the premium or reward. Ka-ching! These are usually immediate or close to immediate; sometimes there's a wait. I try to include that information in the referral listings themselves. There are referrals on this page where there is no immediate reward to you; those are generally programs I have found to be *so amazingly good* that I think they are worth signing up for - even paying for - regardless of freebies.
3. I collect the premium or reward on my end, when there is one. There are referrals on this page where there is no immediate reward for me; those are generally programs I have found to be *so amazingly good* that they are worth me referring to you, even though I don't get anything out of it.
There's an optional fourth step, which involves claiming MY premium. That's right, I pay a premium to people who complete these referral offers - it's my way of saying "thank you" (and also, slightly more cynically, giving people a reason to use my referral links rather than someone else's). See the left sidebar "I Pay It Back" on the home page for complete details, but basically I will give you $1 in cash for every referral offer you successfully complete.
Please note that referral offers do tend to change over time. It may be that you will go to an offer, expecting to get $5 and a coupon for free cheese, only to find that the offer is now $10 cash and a mousetrap. I try to keep up with changes, and you can help me greatly in that process by using the Contact Me link on the left sidebar to inform me of any offers I have listed which have changed, expired, or otherwise need attention.
It's a reasonable question - so often, "free stuff available for free!" on the Internet actually means "you can have this stuff if we can send you an email every day and interrupt your every mealtime, bath, or nap break for the next thousand years." However, with the referrals I recommend, the answer is no, you are not going to get spammed. These are mainstream and legitimate companies, and they follow the Federal laws on spam and marketing. Most particularly, they just spent as much as a thousand dollars recruiting you as a customer; it wouldn't make a lot of sense for their first act to be sending you a thousand spam messages or selling your address to Viagra salesmen. In general, at most, you might start getting an occasional marketing message from the company making the offer. These are easy to turn off once they start - just click that 'unsubscribe' link.
In the unlikely event that you do start receiving excessive communications - one, I'm really sorry about that; my vetting process is thorough but nothing is perfect. Two, please let me know using the Contact Me form on the left sidebar of the Home page, so that I can purge that company from my listings.
No, not unless you sign up for a deal that requires that. (And you won't find any deals like that here, other than some actual subscription services where you know going in that there's a cost.) A few of these programs do sign you up for ongoing subscriptions or services. Many of them are worth the subscription fees - but if one is not to your liking, then just cancel the subscription after you've collected the premium offer. Some offers may require you to be subscribed for a certain time period to collect the offer; this is always identified up-front. There should be no surprises.
In the unlikely event that you do find yourself subscribed to something objectionable - one, I'm really sorry about that, and two, please let me know using the Contact Me form on the left sidebar on the home page, so that I can purge that company from my listings.
Hopefully this has answered your questions - let's get started!