That's not necessarily true.

I'll bet some of your very best customers haven't given you one referral.

Why?

Because they're busy and have a thousand other things on their mind...just like you.

If you rely on just your relationships to get you referrals you'll be disappointed.

The key to getting a consistent stream of referrals is to build referral process into transaction!

That's right, you need to build your referral system INTO TRANSACTION.

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Here's a Great Example of a "Transaction-Based" Referral System _______________________________________________________

The other day I received a promotional letter from TXU Energy (a Texas Energy Company).

In promotional letter they included a leaflet that offered $40 to anyone who referred a friend and became a customer.

Would you like to see it?

Here's front side:

http://tinyurl.com/3wwq7

And here's back side:

http://tinyurl.com/3mynj

They also send this leaflet along with their billing statements. When someone comes out to your house to do maintenance work or respond to a call they leave behind this leaflet.

You see, when a "transaction" happens, they ask for a referral.

There's no face-to-face asking.

They don't wait until it's "right time."

It happens every time there's a transaction.

Because of this, TXU gets a steady stream of referrals. In fact, they can predict with some accuracy that if they give out X amount of leaflets, they'll get back in X amount of referrals.

The results are...

(1) predictable

(2) consistent

(3) repeatable

________________________________________

Applying this Referral Strategy to Your Business ________________________________________

Ask yourself how you can apply this referral strategy to your business.

It doesn't matter if you're a consultant, dry cleaner, auto dealership, or even a large energy company...you can use this referral strategy.

And there's so many variations and applications of this simple referral technique that ANY business can do it. Even yours!

A] Promote your RSS feeds directly below your e-zine subscription box, and always “above fold”. Promote your RSS presentation page (telling your visitors that’s where they can subscribe to your feeds) on most prominent locations of your site.

B] If you’re publishing more than one RSS feed, but rather a couple of focused topic feeds, promote each of them next to their topics. For instance, if you’re publishing an RSS feed on E-mail Marketing, promote RSS feed at top of topic home page, and in every E-mail Marketing article you publish. These links should actually be direct subscriptions links to feeds.

Use this service to cover all of important readers using just one simple button: http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/

C] Promote your RSS feeds in all of your e-mail messages and e-zine issues.

D] As for content, don’t just say “Subscribe to receive news from my site”, but rather prepare compelling copy to specifically show your visitors why they need to subscribe to your content in first place and why they should subscribe specifically to your RSS feeds.

3. ENABLE AUTO-DISCOVERY

Some internet browsers, such as Firefox, make it easy for their users to subscribe to RSS feeds. The browser actually asks user if he wants to subscribe to feeds browser finds on site user is currently on.

Yes, this is even more powerful than your e-mail subscription form, since browser in a way “pushes” user with your RSS feed subscription.

But in order for browser to do this, you need to help it out to find your RSS feed.

Just include following piece of HTML code in section of your webpages and you’ll be all set:

There are many more techniques and opportunities available to you, from “direct subscribe” links to actually using opt-in forms, but these 7 steps should get you started in shortest time possible, and help you achieve a better visitor-to-RSS-subscriber conversion rate than huge majority of sites are achieving today.