Referrals, You, and Free Credits
Referrals, friends, and word of mouth have always been the biggest way IRE has thrived over the years. It is a good sign when people tell friends about a game, business, or product. As such, we are releasing several new ways to reward you for telling people about us over the next few months.
Today, we are starting with a basic referral program. IRE has created a way for you to link to our games. These links will flag any new characters finding our games, as a referral from you.
So what does this do for you?
Free credits of course!
You will receive a 10% referral bonus for every purchase that player ever makes, on any character, on any IRE game, forever. Additionally, any new character coming from your link, who registers, and plays for 5 hours (or more), will earn you one credit. You can earn up to 10 credits per week in this fashion.
Here is an example:
Let’s say someone clicks on your link, makes a character, and then plays for at least 5 hours. Boom, you get one credit. Maybe they experiment on a couple different IRE games with a few different characters. You will get one credit, for every character they make, on any IRE game, as long as they register and play for at least 5 hours.
Maybe that person really likes our games and buys 500 credits on Achaea, and 800 on Midkemia. That is instantly 130 credits for your character. You will continue to earn those credits forever.
This is the first phase of the program. Next month (hopefully), we will release character badges and banners. Basically, we will supply a way to automatically create cool banners, complete with character info, linked to your account. These will be perfect for Facebook pages, signature banners, websites, etc.
The final stage of this program will be lots of fun. In a few months we will release fansite tools and art that will allow you to create your own websites, blogs, and wikis using our art. You will even be able to embed our flash client into your site. While we have not worked out the rewards for fan sites yet, they will be even better than basic referral links.
So how do you get your link? Just type REFLINK into the game with the character you want rewarded.
Once you have your link, you need to get it where people can see it.
Here are some examples of how to use it.
- Twitter or Facebook it with something like this: Hey try out this game and help me earn some rewards. – www.achaea.com/signup.php?eid=ach12345678
- Add it to your signature in forums or blog comments: Come play <a href=”http://www.achaea.com/signup.php?eid=ach12345678“>Imperian</a> with me!
- If you already have a fan site, this is an even better way to link back to our games.
If you can think of some other ways to get your links out there or if you have any suggestions, please comments below.
January 27th, 2010 at 1:18 am
This sounds handy! Although, I would recommend anyone using Twitter to shorten the url first with bit.ly or a similar shortening service…
January 27th, 2010 at 2:04 am
Ah good idea on that. I would certainly suggest that as well.
January 27th, 2010 at 4:08 am
Is there some mechanism to stop people from send references to themselves, making alts, and earning a 10% bonus on themselves?
January 27th, 2010 at 4:40 am
I imagine it would check against the player’s registered email account, but it’s easy enough to use a second one… anything beyond that would be pretty hard to keep tabs on.
January 27th, 2010 at 4:58 am
We do check emails and we are logging everything. If we think it is becoming a problem we will simply not allow the mentor bonus and the referral bonus to stack.
The mentor bonus has really become nothing more then a way to get a bonus on every purchase rather then a ‘help new players’ system.
January 27th, 2010 at 7:01 am
Out of curiosity, would it be a bad thing if I were to ask one of my friends from a game for their link, and use it as well as mine? Like, if I were to paste in her link as well as mine, to give us both a better chance of someone using it?
January 27th, 2010 at 7:06 am
If you mean posting both your links in the same place, I see no problem with that.
Heck, post as many as you want in the same place, it would just reduce your chance of being ‘clicked’.
February 8th, 2010 at 11:17 pm
I’ve been playing since 2001 and I’ve only received the mentor’s bonus once, though I haven’t really mentored many people. I would say that those I have mentored and stuck around had a good experience though.
Though, I’m still not sure what: “The mentor bonus has really become nothing more then a way to get a bonus on every purchase rather then a ‘help new players’ system.” means.
February 9th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Unfortunately, a lot of people have started to ‘game’ the system, by creating a newbie and then being mentored by a friend. After making a purchase, they transfer all the credits from the characters to their main account. This was never the reason for the mentor bonus, so we may have to change it at some point.