The referral marketing channel is one that truly grows over time as new partners and referrers are signed up to refer their friends, contacts, or audiences to your website to sign up or purchase. The company or brand would compensate them per per sale, per site registration or ultimately they would earn a % of the revenue of their referred users that became paid users or purchasers. The channel is typically divided into: customer referrers, affiliate marketers, influencers, and partnerships. Each subset needs to be prospected for and grown over time.

Timeframe: It’s never too early to start bringing on partners/affiliates/referrers.
Budget: The cost of the tools/apps – $100-500/month.
Resources: This channel needs dedicated inhouse resources and agency assistance in many instance.

• Refer-a-Friend – Install a tool to allow your users to refer to their friends or colleagues and earn rewards for doing so. Such as a $20 gift card or something for free. Although money does motivate referrals for certain. See: FriendBuy.com 

• Affiliate Marketers – these would be relevant websites, blogs, email list owners, entities, and other companies, that can promote your service or products to their audiences, and get paid a commission when revenue is generated or someone registers. Recruit Affiliates Here.

• Influencers – these are people with social media followings, that can be reached out to and contacted to work with your company, to create original content about your products. FindYourInfluence.com has a giant database of all types of influencers that can be prospected by someone, either internally at your company or externally, or both.

These are some great ways to grow your referral channels over time. You have to keep growing it each month and it will grow larger and produce more revenue year over year.