There are many different ways to build a passive income. In my recent article on the topic, I already mentioned a few noteworthy options. If you don't know anything about the concept of passive income yet, I'd advise you to read that article first. Today I want to talk about another interesting method of building a passive income for yourself - acquiring referrals.
To do so, I'll first talk about the concept of referrals, discuss why this can be an especially interesting way of building passive income for some but also point out its limitations, and finally give you some examples of sites that I do or did acquire referrals for.
Most of you probably have come across the concept of referring users to a service or website one way or the other. There are many different implementations for referral reward programs, but the basic idea is always the same. In return for introducing new users to a service or website, you are paid a certain reward by said service. Referral programs are a great way for services to attract new users. Instead of investing money directly into marketing, they encourage their active users to do the marketing for them. In return, they only have to pay once a new user actually registers with the service or actually makes a purchase. Generally, this promises to make new user acquisition cheaper and more targeted for the service.
What makes acquiring referrals so tempting as a means of building passive income is that they don't require you to invest any money on your end. While buying LBI-Tokens or YIELDBONDA is a great way to create regular, passive income, they also require you to invest some of your own money upfront. With referrals, you only need to invest your time and energy to attract new users to the service of your choice.
How you acquire these users will certainly depend on what your daily activities look like. You could talk about the service on Social Media, share a Link on twitter or leave it in a comment. The issue at hand is that this will often be regarded as spamming and might even get you blocked or kicked from certain sites. Personally, I feel like sharing a referral link is always valid, as long as it's done in an unintrusive way and focused on the current topic of a conversation but different users will have different feelings towards referral links.
In case you are an author yourself, adding referral links to your articles is a great way to attract new users to a service. Whenever I talk about any game or service, I always add my referral link to it. So instead of just writing Splinterlands, you'll get a clickable Splinterlands with my referral link attached. You should be aware that this is only going to work if your article is not only made to spread your referral link, though. If people see it as spam, they are more than likely to ignore it.
Personally, I enjoy hunting referrals a lot and I do so extensively. Still, you have to be aware that this is not going to make you rich over night and it comes with it's own issues and limitations. First of all, people tend to switch to new services or games over time, so more often than not, your referrals will provide you with some early gains but will be less and less profitable over time. If you really want to build a passive income that way, you have to aim for services that you expect to be running for a long time and that also will keep paying you indefinitely.
When I decide if it's worth my time to go for referrals I look at a number of different factors:
- How long do I expect the service to run and how likely is it to keep the users I refer for a prolonged time?
- How much can I earn from a referral?
- Will I only get a one-time payment or can I earn permanently?
- How hard will it be to attract new users?
- How involved am I with the service myself?
The last point might not hold true for everybody, but personally I only try to get referrals for services that I use myself and deem worthwhile. There are others who really won't care about the product they sell as long as they receive their payment, but I have a hard time promoting something I don't care for in the first place.
So now that you have an understanding what to look for, I'll provide you with some examples of referral reward programs and discuss why I think each one is interesting or not.
Publish0x
Publish0x has a great and simple referral reward program. Every user you get to join will provide you with a 5% bonus of all tips he provides or receives. This is the perfect program for many of the aforementioned criteria. I expect Publish0x to be around for a long time, the earning potential is basically unlimited, and I'm pretty involved with the service myself. So the perfect service to hunt for referrals? Well, it depends... Here are my lifetime earnings from my referrals:
That's... not too much. What's the problem here? First of all, there are two sites I publish my articles with - LeoFinance and Publish0x. Anybody on the latter will very likely already be registered, while everyone reading my article on the former most likely will already know about the site as well. So this serves to show another issue with referral hunting - it works best if you do it for yet unknown services or services that are not wildly known in your own ecosphere.
There's another issue that's pretty apparent here - 5% of all my earnings on Publish0x would amount to 13.6$ right now. That's because I'm an active author, though. Users that only tip but never publish are earning a lot less and 5% of that is next to nothing. So in conclusion, referring authors to Publish0x could earn you some great passive income, but finding them will be pretty hard for most of us.
Rising Star
A service that makes it a lot easier to attract referrals is Rising Star, a pretty cool game here on Hive. The game is a mission based idle game that's free to join. Basically, every user that joins the game using your link will earn you 1 Starbit (the games token) per mission he does for life. Again, this is a really good offer in terms of accessibility and longevity. The earning potential is unlimited and has no end date, so this one looks like another really cool option. Let's look at the numbers:
Those are a lot of users and a lot of Starbits. Adding them all up, I've made 21,351 Starbits from my referrals. The thing is, at current valuation, that's around 6.5 Hive or about a dollar. So while it's cool to see these numbers tick up, it hardly can be considered passive income. So is it generally a bad idea to hunt referrals for games? Not at all, here are two great options for you:
Splinterlands
Splinterlands is another great game on Hive, but other than Rising Star, it's Pay2Play. You'll earn 5% of all credits spent on boosters, potions, and so on by players referred by you. If you can find some active players, this can translate to some pretty decent earnings.
1000 Credits are 1$, so this little shopping trip by a single player netted me 3.8$ alone. Because of that, Splinterlands certainly is a service with a referral program that I deem worthy of my time. Basically, games that offer paid4service are obviously going to be more interesting than free2play titles. While it's a lot easier to get referrals for the latter, they also have a lot less to pay you since they don't earn anything from your referral at first. Games that actually require their players to make a purchase, though, can easily share some of their revenue and thus make for a more interesting offer.
Not all great referral programs are also good for generating a passive income, though. For contrast, here's another game on Hive:
eXode
Another card based Pay2Play game on Hive, eXode has a really great referral program up its sleeves. For each new player that you introduce to the game, you are rewarded with 2 booster packs. These packs come at 3$ each, so every new player referred to the game will net you a pretty decent 6$ in value. Thing is, there are no additional gains available after that. In contrast to Splinterlands, you don't earn a share of all purchases but are only rewarded the moment your referred player makes his first purchase.
Nevertheless, bringing new players to eXode is certainly worth my time, it's simply not helping me to build any passive income.
The above should serve to give you some ideas on what to look for and what to avoid when you determine what referral reward program could be interesting for you. Ultimately, there probably is no perfect program that works best for everybody. It's always about what you want to achieve, what options you have available to acquire these referrals, and, obviously, what kind of service you enjoy most yourself.
As you can see from these examples, for me, that's crypto gaming. I write a lot about these topics, so it only comes natural for me to go for these. Referral reward programs are not exclusive to these kinds of services though. They can be found in basically any kind of offer and no matter what you are interested in most, chances are you'll find some great referral links to promote if you look around closeley.
So, are you hunting referrals yourself? What offers have been the most lucrative for you? Anyway, that's all from me today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!