Hello everyone…
As promised, here is an outline of the new PressDisplay.com Referral Program that was launched in September 2006. This program is in its early stages of development and so let me tell you what we have now and what’s coming soon.
Note, this program will replace our current Affiliate Program, opening up new opportunities for more people to become marketing partners of PressDisplay.com.
What we have now…
Currently the PressDisplay Referral Program gives subscribers the potential to earn money simply by sharing articles or pages by email or through their blogs. In other words…if you share an article with someone and he/she becomes a paid subscriber to PressDisplay, you earn a commission based on their subscription plan.
For the first 99 paid referrals, you earn a commission rate of 10%. For each month where you have 100 or more paid referrals, you earn a commission rate of 15%. Note on paid referrals for monthly subscriptions, you will receive your commission for up to 3 years, from the date of the first payment.
One of the nice things about this plan is that subscribers can now see an up to date status of their referrals by viewing their Referral Report. Just select My Services/My Account and then choose Referrals on the left hand side of the screen.
Every time your account balance reaches $25.00 or more, you can request partial or total payment of your earned referral amount which will be remitted to you through PayPal in U.S. dollars.
To redeem your earned referral commission, click on the Referrals link on the left hand side of the referral report screen, scroll down and click the [Redeem Now] button. You must ensure that the email address you have used to create your PressDisplay account is registered with your PayPal account to receive payment.
Sharing Articles
Sharing articles through email or blogging is very easy. Just open an article in text mode and either click on the envelope icon to send it in an email or the “B” icon to post it to your blog.
Once the article is shared, we take care of the rest. Just check your referral report from time to time and redeem your commission.
This new Referral Program is in effect now, and as I mentioned earlier, it will form the basis of our new Affliate Program. This would mean that affiliates would be paid commissions on subscriptions and single purchase of publications and not on clicks.
What we plan to add to this program very shortly….
1. Banners, Buttons and Links
With the current Affiliate Program, we offered:
- text links – to the home page of PressDisplay.com, individual titles or groups of titles (e.g. by language, country)
- thumbnails for individual newspapers or groups
- banners
Soon we will be offering more powerful “widgets” for referrers to use on their web sites and blogs to promote PressDisplay. These will include the following elements from PressDisplay:
• The Slide Show from the PressDisplay homepage.
This widget would run on your site just like it does on PressDisplay. We plan on offering the ability to filter the pictures to show the ones that you want, rather than all the ones we currently show each day.
• Newsline, Most Discussed, News by Category or Top Stories widgets
As with the slide show, we’ll provide a number of other widgets that will run on your site.
If you wanted to, you could practically create the whole home page of PressDisplay on your site with all these widgets 
2. Set up a monitor for a friend
With this feature, you could set up a monitor on behalf of a friend or colleague. When the monitor triggers as a result of an article being published containing the keywords you chose, an email would be sent to your friend with a link to that story. (see the post “Monitoring just the news” for tips on how to set up a monitor).
For example, if you know of someone who is an executive in a company and needs to stay on top of her company’s name in the news or the competition, you could set up a monitor of her company’s or competitor’s name and every time the name showed up in a PressDisplay publication, they would be informed immediately via email. They would be able to read the story for free.
If after reading the story, she wanted to buy the paper or subscribe, you would once again be credited with commission for that sale as described above (single or recurring).
3. Gift subscriptions
We are also going to allow people to send a monthly subscription to PressDisplay.com to friends and family as a gift. If the receiver chooses to renew the subscription when the gift subscription expires, the originator of the gift would once again receive a commission on the renewal (same as above – one time or recurring).
Summary
The new Referral Program has a number of benefits for affiliates. It:
- Opens opportunities to add many new members to our program without having to negotiate contracts and pre-authorize affiliates. This does open up some security risks, which is why we are moving to a commission based model over the pay-per-click model
- Pays recurring commissions (like a revenue sharing plan). 10-15% recurring commission for up to 3 years is one of the highest paying programs in the industry.
- Offers more tools to support affiliates in their marketing of PressDisplay
- Is not impacted by pricing plan changes down the road
Thanks for taking the time to review this program. Now, I’d like to hear from you on how you think we can improve it even further.
And thousands of people are saying NO to newsprint and saying YES to digital newspapers instead. Not only are they not giving up anything (except maybe inky fingers), they are gaining, by enjoying access to hundreds of international newspapers they never had the opportunity to read before, plus a ton of advanced digital features that enhance their reading pleasure.
