Awesome write up, I'm amazed it performed so well. Most people's first few brushes with adwords end very poorly. At work my only job is to manage display campaigns.. I'm wondering if I could do something like this in my free time.<p>FYI - if this test was ran for much longer or at a larger scale his adwords account probably would've been locked. Google has strict affiliate rules and you aren't supposed to have two accounts sending traffic to the same domain.<p>Unfair advantage: <a href="https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020954?rd=1" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020954?rd=1</a>
Referral links are the most amazing financial product I've ever seen.<p>I'll start from the end: Companies get FREE advertising from YOU, and unless you get them an actual customer, they don't pay.<p>Effectively companies are “forcing” you to advertise for free (forced by your desire to "make easy money"), and then they pay you a commission if you get them a paying customer.<p>And you may fail to realise that you are already paying them by placing their ad in your page. Because in order for you to get money, you need to get them a click that ends in a paying customer. You could have pointed that customer to something you owned and theoretically you could have received the full value of their purchase. So losing that is a payment you make in order to "refer" a customer... Its crazy!
Robinhood's original referral promotion (and the one I signed up for) was $10. Presumably people were just collecting the $10 and not using it to buy stock so they pretty quickly changed it to "1 stock." If it were still $10 the person would have made $230 rather than losing money.<p>Also, what's the TOS on this referral promotion? IIRC, for many services these referral codes are for private distribution and forbid this sort of thing.
Have you thought about putting the code (or a similar one) in the article to try and make up the difference? Nothing like content marketing to turn a failure into a win!
Hey, I noticed your site doesn't have SSL.<p><a href="https://letsencrypt.org/" rel="nofollow">https://letsencrypt.org/</a><p>SSL Certificates are easy and free to get, and they protect the privacy and security of your users. They also prevent ISPs from doing shady things like injecting ads into your site.
Overtime you will make that $100 back. But quite an interesting article. I think you can do better signing people up to mealpal and their 50$ amazon GCs.