The refer program has been instrumental in attracting big projects to bitshares and making it far more attractive as a value proposition. Actually without it I know of at least one project that would have not been interested in bitshares.
They are attracted by referral program first, then are surprised by high fees and hence are discouraged to build business on Bitshares.
No, that has not been my experience thus far.
Can you
1. Name the company
2. Back your statement with numbers ?
1. BunkerChain Labs
by the way, BCL, you should look at your Google results for your business, I see this...
BunkerChainLabs.com
www.bunkerchainlabs.com/A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Is there a "how-to" for the program? How to use it, what to expect,, how to verify, etc. As far as I knew there was still a bug that needed fixing. I was, and still am, under the impression that a functioning referral program could snowball. I haven't seen very much discussion about it, people's successes / failures, strategies, etc. etc.
The how-to is haphazardly found in the forum, ideally it would be front and center in OpenLedger somewhere, letting new users see how they can easily refer their friends - moreover, the link they would use would be pre-done using their account name so they could just copy and paste it to send to their friends. As of now, there is very little to no mention of the referral program in the wallet... save the Membership page which is buried (it would be nicer to have its own referral page with info and lists of referred users and their account status). Furthermore, the Membership page does explain for Basic Members that upgrading their account makes them "qualify to earn referral income from users they register with or referrer to the network", however, once you upgrade to a Lifetime Member, it says
NOTHING about referring users and the benefits of doing so!!!
I have mentioned a couple times, that I don't see the affiliate name being passed into the wallet's URL when people refer a user to the bitshares.org page, so it is best to have them go straight to the wallet with your links. This should be fixed. Not to mention, on bitshares.org, reading from left to right, it emphasizes Download Now before Online Wallet, which is totally backwards especially since if a user does select Download Now to download the wallet, it isn't possible at the moment for the ID of the referrer to get attached to the download link, so you would lose out anyway.
Out of the 11 referred users I have so far, 1 is a test that I did. So out of the 10, 1 user has upgraded to an annual member, 1 has 40 bts in transaction fees, 1 has a total of 2 transactions, and the rest registered and did nothing. I am no affiliate wizard by any stretch of the imagination, but I run a regularly updated bitshares info blog, a bitshares info website, and have put banner ads front and center on a few of my other non-crypto sites. Admittedly, my sites are not by any stretch of the imagination high traffic sites. All told, less than $10 worth, most of which is from the one user who upgraded to an annual member.
It is kind of telling that the so called expert marketers, rgcrypto and bitmarket, are no where to be seen. Both received delegate pay at one point, and the latter was the one who helped design the affiliate system in the first place.
With that said, I still like it and have big expectations for the referral system personally and for bitshares as a whole. One suggestion I would make to those who are willing to do the unheralded dirty work, would be to inform affiliate marketers that this opportunity exists, i.e. a simple post in a forum like
https://www.warriorforum.com/ might be all it would take to get some real marketers with their tens of thousands of newsletter followers in on the action.