Steem - First Refer A Friend Program
Referral programs are used by big corporations from Amazon , Walmart, Best Buy, banks to insurance companies. You name it the most successful ventures in the world have the most incentivized referral programs. Data shows they are quite successful. Marketing accounts for about 50% of some major businesses revenues. Creating marketing campaigns can be very expensive but effective and the lifeblood of anything you want to see grow and prosper the direction of your endeavor.
In cryptocurrency bitcoin has achieved a branding and network effect that has made it synomous with cryptocurrency. Although not yet mass adopted the branding and marketing for bitcoin has taken off quite well. A product like bitcoin at this point may or may not need a great deal of marketing. However there is no such thing as too much marketing as long as its the right and most effective type of marketing.
Steem branding has yet to reach its full potential. The idea of build it and they come would be nice if it worked outside of the theory. Why do you need marketing? It's simple without marketing you can become irrelevant. If nobody cares to use your product or it doesn't get enough buzz it can become obsolete. Cryptocurrency depends heavily on media attention. Unfortunately it doesn't receive the media attention it needs on the level to have masses of people able to understand the importance of it.
The effect of more people creates more value. In the early days of Steem impressive large earnings on blogs pulled in people and created an uproar as they struggled to gain entry to understand why this was happening. The introduction of the world to Steem created a small sensation and culture of people drawn to this idea. In having so many moving parts to create this attention when social and cultural clashes of the steem culture met ideas and tribal like customs not relatable to everyone.
Steem began to decline. Now Steem is doing a great job of stopping these cultural clashes through ideas like hives and steem groups. Now that challenges to the disconnection are being met now is the time to launch marketing campaigns to bring people and value back to steem. However marketing is expensive. How is we achieve this cost effectve and making our marketing dollars go to the maximum exposure?
First i wanna say that i don't wish to offend anyone or projects on this proposal system. However i would like to say that i believe that we have moved in the wrong direction about how to make steem this great product to the masses. There are so many great things about Steem already it defies logic and reason almost for there to be noticeable declines in alexa ranking visits to blogs as well as quality of content.
So what has been our problem? Well the mood and distribution of steem in some idea of fairness somehow was swayed. It's hard to point to one specific idea but several factors caused a great decline in steem. The fact of the matter is steem introduced a great idea where you conveniently can earn based on your social media interactions. Whereas large networks like facebook compensate users are zero. However the system still has billions of users and even slight declines are not enough to take away from having that much network effect and site usage. So its very difficult for something like facebook not to work at this point.
Many of the directions we've take with the Steem blockchain through this (SPS) Steem Proposal System i just don't feel realistically will even tough the surface of many things that would need to happen to get steem back more valuable in the publics eye with a positive sentiment. Steem has hundreds if not thousands of applications that can attract anyone from the mailman to the dog. Unfortunately i wish to call out products on this SPS that appear to be nothing more than developers attempting to get money for buidling something that may be interesting yet not effective to attacking the real problems.
The real issue is about community and social interaction in our opinion. This is why we've created the Steem Based Refer a Friend program. To illustrate how it works our site which is part of the steem community Bitcoin MYK has an affiliate dashboard feature we believe we're able to integrate into a system that pays steem users to refer their friends, family and business associates.
How it Works?
Our Refer a Friend project works simple. The system will in a tri-way system pay 3 people out. The first will be Bitcoin MYK as the main referrer, next the Referree and last the Referee. In order to make this as cost effective as possible and have no dollar wasted. Bitcoin MYK would use it's existing affiliate program on its website which is a scot token as well. This dashboard would then match up to our Steem group which is part of the steem blockchain at Bitcoin MYK groups.
Although we could do a hard rooted integration that would bring us back to we believe spending more unnecessary money development but lacking user base to bring us more value. We believe the thousands of applications we currently have are sufficient. We have everything from a Version of Instagram..to reddit to Quora to Video hosting . to gaming . you name it we got it. We feel we have almost touched every base in that area. The one thing we dont have is users and enough buzz for people to care about Steem.
So by foregoing any more system development and cost associated with that. We prefer to match our dashboard to serve us to match referrers and referees to accounts part of our steem group. So in the Refer A Friend system. We'd then issue payments to both the Referrer and Referee and promote the product in a way both parties earn by joining.
This can solve several issues. So upon getting their accounts they gain steem in their wallet and so does the referrer. This may incentivize a large amount of people to participate in this program. These type programs have also proven to be quite effective.
When the funds are depleted the referral program will end. At this point it will be up to the community to approve it to relaunch. Affiliate marketers will be given notice of this and any affiilates earning off links cast will be compensated via the recommission of the program. Affiliates not compensated in round one will be compensated on program restart. Bitcoin MYK tokens will also be rewarded in the event referrers don't receive compensation.
The return on the dollars spent is probably more valuable than 1 sbd per account. So we would like to believe that new accounts would equal out to being worth more than the money spent. We believe it would be dollars well spent.
Funding
We would first start this in phases to see if its effective and if we should continue. So we'd first start Seeking up to 25,000 sbd. For example every part of the tri-way refer system would receive an equal amount. So for example bitcoin myk system receives 1 sbd - referrer 1 sbd and finally new account 1 sbd. The hope would be to incentivize and stimulate the ideas about the Steem blockchain to get enough people talking about it. Video content creators would gain by posting their affiliate links on their videos, all through social media people would be incentivized to earn sbd per referral.
If the first phase proves successful and we believe this to be working and the community agrees. We'll seek more funding in stages. Up until the value transfer back into steem is acceptable. Some market analysis determines new account value to range anywhere from $1 on average to about $200. This has been hard to determine based on the steem model. However now that Steem runs advertising it is quite possible new accounts and eyeballs could we'd like to believe be worth more than 1 sbd on average. If that idea or assessment is correct then it would mean the dollars are well spent.
Closing thoughts
Steem is a marvelous product. There are only small factors i believe that hold it back. This is one of them and can easily be corrected. Again i don't wish to discourage any products out there or proposals. The data does suggest that we have a large amount of apps that don't draw people. if they dont draw people in then they aren't working for us. So buidling more things may not be a solution. We believe this may be the missing component. We thankyou for your consideration of our proposal. We'll be glad to answer any questions comments or concerns you may have.
Affiliate dashboard available here and group at: https://www.bitcoinmyk.com/affiliate-area/
https://www.bitcoinmyk.com/social-media-2/
