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Thanks.
Very very soon http://flow.cloudomatic.com
Trusting third parties with the email addresses of all your customers and prospects is not always wise.
A self-managed type is IDEV affiliate: http://www.idevdirect.com/
Over at http://blogsetup.com , I set up Post Affiliate Pro with some custom PHP code to integrate it so the commission triggers upon fill out of a form, then goes into a "Pending" state until we manually verify it. Post Affiliate Pro is pretty flexible and has a good API for this kind of stuff.
I also looked at iDevAffiliate, but ultimately picked Post Affiliate Pro because it has better SEO on the links and, in general, it had better reviews. The general class of software you are looking for is "affiliate software".
The people that I know that run serious businesses using referral systems rolled their own for tight integration and because of privacy issues. Trusting third parties with the email addresses of all your customers and prospects is not always wise.
http://zferral.com/ has an easy build-it-yourself referral system.
The people that I know that run serious businesses using referral systems rolled their own for tight integration and because of privacy issues. Trusting third parties with the email addresses of all your customers and prospects is not always wise.
It's not necessary to roll your own affiliate software just for privacy reasons. There are plenty of products out there where you buy an owned license, install it on your server, and integrate with it using an API instead of using a third party system. Post Affiliate Pro and iDevAffiliate are the two most well-known ones.
Referral marketing uses your existing customerbase as marketing vehicle, affiliate systems tend to focus on other businesses that send you customers in return for a split, and as a rule you would find far fewer affiliates than you would have potential referrers in a referral marketing situation. Referral marketing usually centers around discounts, where as affiliate marketing centers around profit sharing, splits or one time fees for a sale.
The differences, even though there are many are subtle enough that it may be possible to use the one for the other.