How to Refer Others to Blastoff

October 15th, 2009 by admin

This post summarizes a lot of what this blog is about, but of course not in as much detail as the whole blog can offer.

The first major issue causing Blastoff referrals to be confusing is that the following ‘join’ now’ blank is not yet active, at least until the prelaunch.

The blank on every page where you can refer others to Blastoff

The very existence of this section is really confusing because it’s obviously made for the long-haul strategy, the Viral part of Blastoff’s marketing, yet it is not working. If you try to enter your details now, you get the following page:

Blastoff error Not Yet Ready

So what’s a champing-at-the-bit, downline-building-hungry internet marketer to do?

BUILD YOURSELF A LIST

It’s really not that hard to build a list of email subscribers… Services like Aweber, Constant Contact, or GetResponse will all make it extremely easy for you to plug a form into your website that builds your list for you. -All you really have to do is find a way to get people interested enough to opt-in to it.

So on your own website or blog, or even other places you control like a Squidoo lens, wordpress blog, Hubpage or Weebly site, place your opt-in form there, and ask people to join your ‘notification list’ so that you will notify them immediately once Blastoff goes live.

When trying to refer others to Blastoff AFTER it finally launches, things change a bit. Using a list can still help you but not for the same reason. In fact it’s not recommended for most people after the launch.

Once that form above goes live, the best way to get Blastoff sign-ups will be to use the internal email invite system. (Which will also go live at the same time.)

Import all of your friends and family to Blastoff from services like facebook, gmail, myspace, and other web communities. They’ve gone through great trouble to make this the most powerful friend-inviter in the history of web 2.0, so you might as well use it to the fullest. Once logged into your Blastoff page, you can easily find it near the top of your internal page like this one:

Invite Friends to Blastoff Link

Note: This picture was taken of the link while my Blastoff theme was set to a black background… These colors could be different for you, depending on your theme settings. The icon will remain orange, however.

The Inviter System Limit Explained:

There is a limit on how many invitations you can have pending at once. -Not just send at once, but in a pending state.

You’ll be able to send invites out to up to 250 different email addresses at a time, from any source you can think of, (Yes, even uploading your own spreadsheet of email addresses!) but they all go towards your overall allotment of allowed invites out at once.

Yes, it’s a little confusing, but think of it this way. If you have 200 people in your facebook profile that you just sent invites to, and you want to send invites out to another 100 from your MySpace account, then that’s simply too many for now.

It appears that you’ll be able to IMPORT the 100 people from MySpace, but then only send invites to 50 of them, because that’s all the invite credits you’ll have left.

So how do you invite more than 250? There are two ways:

1. You wait 2 weeks. Blastoff has said that all ignored invites will be renewed after a 2-week period. So 2 weeks after you sent those facebook invite to 200 people, you could send up to 250 more.

2. Your invite is accepted by the recipient. If 50 of those facebook invites are immediately accepted, then you can send out all 100 of your myspace invites right away.

You don’t have to use the inviter system, but you’ll find that blastoff makes it easy for you to do so, and better yet, getting your emails delivered with their system is much more assured… It’s pretty likely that spam detectors on commercial services like gmail and yahoo will throw this kind of email in their spam boxes unless it comes from blastoff themselves… Something that they are working hard on right now to ensure. (So hard that it is delaying the launch.)

Other methods of getting Blastoff Downline

As any Internet Marketer earning his or her keep can tell you, there are almost limitless ways for a creative person to get people to sign up under you at blastoff. A few major strategies that you could try include:

Submitting articles to article directories and linking each to your blastoff page
Using safelists to blast out ads to your Blastoff page
Placing blog comments linking back to your Blastoff page
Creating forum comments with your signature link pointing to your Blastoff page
Creating a Viral eBook and linking it to your Blastoff page

Each one of these methods will be a post on this blog. Even more will be added eventually.

The one thing you have to keep in mind about building a Blastoff downline is that no matter what method you take, you must make sure to start implementing it the very moment of the Launch or Pre-launch, and stop once the world has become saturated with Blastoff members. I can’t tell you how long this window of opportunity will last, but it won’t be years… Possibly a year at most, but more like just 3 or 5 months in total.

So naturally, using a method that takes a long time to build up momentum on is not desirable. You should in fact try ALL methods of getting Blastoff sign-ups, all at once, but for most people, tactics like the Viral eBook which takes a lot of time to build up critical mass aren’t worth it because the method doesn’t have a chance of delivering people right away… Months later it will do an awesome job, to be sure, but to catch that huge surge at the beginning it will fail every time.