What is Referral Monitor?

Referral Monitor is a web based application which allows you to manage a referral marketing campaign with minimum hassle.

Pricing

Like most of the other web based applications/services Referral Monitor offers 4 separate packages based on the features. Pricing starts from $5.99/month and goes up to $19.99/month mainly depending on the number of referrals you can add for a given month.

You also could sign up for their FREE account (with limited functionality) to familiarize with the application before subscribing for a paid account.

Why Use Referral Marketing?

The world is overwhelmed with marketing and advertising; with so many, often conflicting, messages it is no wonder today’s consumer discounts what they see on a billboard, hear on the radio or see on their screen- TV, computer and mobile phone alike! Consumers are increasingly turning to one channel they can trust: friends and colleagues that have personal experience with the product or service under consideration.

Effective referral marketing does not have to include ad campaigns, discounts, coupons or fancy gifts. Many businesses that don’t use rewards, or are prevented by regulation from doing so, mistakenly operate under the assumption they can’t do referral marketing. Nothing is further from the truth. The most important referral marketing campaign isn’t a campaign at all; it is a way of doing business.

Referral marketing leverages another sales force to grow business. This channel, also known as the existing customer base, is low cost and highly effective. Like any channel, however, it does take some management to flourish.

Source: ReferralMonitor.com

Bret’s Note

As mentioned in the above section referral marketing campaigns are one of the most effective ways to promote your small business products and services. But managing a good campaign is a daunting task due to the complexities such as monitoring the referrals, rewarding them, etc. This is getting more complicated if you expect to have several levels of the campaign. Referral Monitor seems a good attempt to simplify the process and help you with your small business referral marketing campaigns with the minimum cost.

However I’d like to see them (Referral Monitor team) improving this application to make it a real success.

What is Pingdom?

Pingdom is a powerful online tool which helps you to monitor your website uptime. Servers could fail randomly for couple of seconds, minutes, hours. Whether you are at work or even while you sleep Pingdom will keep you up to date on such failures.

How it works?

Any business acting online has at one time or another run into problems with network outages, a website that either responds slowly or not at all, undelivered emails, or other problems that have degraded the service they want to offer their customers and end-users online.

The problem is, how do you as a business really know where the problem lies, or if there even is a problem? You do not visit your own site and use your own services every minute of the day, every day of the year. This is where Pingdom comes in.

Pingdom gives you the tools you need to monitor the quality of your presence on the Internet, around the clock all year long.

Source: Pingdom.com

Pricing

Pingdom offers all this for a flat monthly subscription which is only $9.95/month.

Bret’s Note

If you are a small business which relies heavily on your website for your day to day businesses, then you’ve got to minimize the downtimes and failures. Your host may tell that they have a guaranteed uptime of 99% but sometimes this may not be the truth. Yet keeping an eye on the website downtimes may not be practical while managing your small business and its many activities. So Pingdom could be an ideal solution.

Like to read more on Pingdom? They too have a blog.

Its almost 40 days since I started this blog with the intention of making this a useful resource for small businesses to find quality services, products, offers and news that affect their business. I am glad, plans are working better than I expected.

Visitors are gradually increasing in numbers and I am receiving dozens of emails requesting to feature various small business products and services here. I have my own limitations (less time for blogging, etc.) and as a result not in a position to feature all that. Bad news yeah? Don’t worry. Here is an alternative.

I thought of setting up a Small Business directory dedicated to small businesses. Its FREE, simply pick the most relevant category and add yours. I’ll give priority to ones listed (and approved) in the directory when featuring services/products in small-business-services blog.

To preserve the quality of the directory, only 100 listings will be allowed per category. This should give better weight/value for your back link with better search engine optimization.