What are referrals

Referral is the link of a web page that redirects to your site, it's a kind of digital word-of-mouth that gets you talked about on other sites.

The referral is created with the purpose of promoting your website through collaborations, more or less structured, with a client or a collaborator who inserts the link to your site (in exchange for an economic compensation or not).

What is referral marketing

This technique is fundamentally a true and proper marketing strategy that brings traffic to your website.

The originating site is called the referrer and hosts your link (the referral link), thanks to an economic agreement that provides a fee at the moment of the link click, or as a mutual exchange of links (you will also host a link from the other person).

What is a Referral Program

A referral program is defined as a profit-oriented collaboration where the referral (the individual who is already enrolled in the program) gives a percentage to the initial subscriber (a commission for sales generated by that link). This compensation is known as the referral fee.

In referral marketing, there are also free referral collaborations, such as those between collaborators and colleagues that do not involve financial commissions and instead, are based on mutual help and the exchange of their own links. This free form of referral marketing is built on referral websites, which are sites where destination links are inserted.

Difference Between Referral Program and Affiliate Program

If, as mentioned, the referral program can be non-profit or may involve a fee between the parties, those actions that are part of a referral program where there is already a collaborative relationship between the parties leading to the referral relationship and trust between the parties is often fundamental.

Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are always for profit and involve more complex relationships between the parties.

There is not, therefore, a relationship between the two parties but rather a subordinate rapport in which the person who embeds the specific link on their site gets paid by the company or professional when a user clicks on or purchases a product from that particular link.

There are also affiliate programs between major companies and individuals, such as the Amazon affiliate program, just to give an example.

Amazon offers a program where users can sign up, insert special links into their own website and, if a user makes a purchase on Amazon through that link, they receive a percentage of the sales. 

There are different types of affiliations (commission-based on sale or just click) but, in any case, the relevance of the organization providing the earning opportunity (the merchant), as well as the progressive increase of subscribers, is crucial.

Those who do Affiliate marketing, also strongly push for commissions on the registration of new participants in the affiliate program itself. 

Merchants like Dropbox or Wish and many others also set up strategies that offer benefits or commissions if you invite new people to the program and they sign up.

Referral is a powerful tool for increasing traffic to one's website while affiliation is a tangible earning strategy entrusted to the structure of third-party entities and one's own reputation.