I personally have never used such a 'referral fee'. I do get word-of-mouth advertising, but I don't go around telling people to do it, they do it of their own volition and goodwill.
I also have not had large contracts arise from word-of-mouth advertising, and paying someone $5 for a $50 job is high in my mind. However, I do participate in a couple of the online affiliate networks ( bn.com <http://bn.com>, crucial.com <http://crucial.com>), where they provide me with a percentage based on orders originating from my website, but they are 'legit' businesses, with loads of customers, and it's a direct form of advertising I'm providing for them that they're paying for on a (potentially) much smaller scale than they would if they paid a set rate per month to put their link on my site. So, the referral fee you talk about, while potentially a good idea, really shouldn't extend past one person (A gets x% for B, but not for C whom B refers you to). It's advertising, plain and simple, and you don't normally pay the third/fourth/fifth/n-tier people to advertise. Tide pays CBS to refer customers to them. But they don't pay me to refer another layer after that. WMM On 8/4/05, Joseph Mack NA3T <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Thu, 4 Aug 2005, Jeffrey A. Groves wrote: > > > I consider the whole "introduction fee" deal to be a revolting practice > that > > is tantamount to usury. > > well yes. > > All I know is that when I approached the (non-technical) customer > with my unsolicited proposal for their setup, I didn't even get the > courtesy of a return phone call accepting or declining my offer. > When my (non-technical) introducer offered to have a go (without me > there), he glad-handed them, slapped them on the back and did a whole lot > of zero content bluster. The non-technical customer representative > said "why sure". > > It appears that technical people have a hard time selling a technical > product to a non-technical person. In my work I've found this to > be the norm. The people with money don't want to talk to their > own technical people. They'd rather talk to sales people e.g. > > > http://www.austintek.com/book_reviews/the_ibm_way.html > > Joe > > -- > Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina > jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map > generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml > Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux! > -- > TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug > TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ > TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ > TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc > -- http://warrenmyers.com "God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers." --Paul Erdős
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