Referrals
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You can earn a referral bonus of $50 for every user you refer who goes on to earn or pay $1000 on oDesk assignments. You can refer as many people as you'd like - friends, colleagues, even strangers! You can earn 1 bonus payment per referred user. Referral bonuses are processed weekly. Both your and the referred user's accounts must be in good standing to qualify.
- You share your unique referral link by inviting a friend to join, posting a 'hire me' banner, publishing a job feed widget, etc.
- A person follows your link and registers on oDesk as either a buyer or provider.
- The referred user earns or pays $1000 on oDesk assignments.
- $50 is credited to your oDesk financial account.
Referral links send visitors to oDesk so they can sign up. But you're not just spreading the word - their success on oDesk can earn you a bonus!
Every user has a unique referral link URL. You can find yours in Payments > Referrals on the Tools tab. We provide you the code and images to embed text links and several styles of banners anywhere that accepts HTML. The buyer-focused banner ads link to your referral URL and direct the person to the oDesk homepage. The provider-focused banner ads link to your referral URL and direct the person to your provider profile.
Feel free to use our hosted images or adjust the code to link your own image or text. The referral links will work whether you're directly sharing the URL or linking some text or an image. More technical users may wish to further customize the HTML code and that's fine too. Just keep the referral URL intact so you get the credit.
By default, referral URLs take visitors to the oDesk homepage. Referral URLs are formatted like this:
http://www.odesk.com/referrals/track/userID
To send your referrals to a different page, such as your profile, you'll need to add a redirect and a new target URL (such as we've done on your provider-focused banner ads). A redirected referral URL looks something like this:
http://www.odesk.com/referrals/track/userID?redir=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.odesk.com%2Fusers
Referral feeds are oDesk job search feeds (RSS or Atom) that track new sign-ups just like your referral links. You'll have the opportunity to earn a referral bonus for each new user who arrived at oDesk through your referral feed.
Any job search can be saved as a job feed. And you can turn any of those job search feeds into referral feeds. You're free to share and distribute job and referral feeds on your website, social networking sites, your blog or anywhere else you wish!
- Perform a job search and save it as an RSS or Atom feed.
- Paste the feed's URL somewhere you can edit it.
- Add
&refurl=userIDto the URL (see placement in example below). Replace 'userID' with your oDesk user ID.
Job Feed:
http://www.odesk.com/jobs/rss?q=PHP
Referral Feed:
http://www.odesk.com/jobs/rss?q=PHP&refurl=userID
Our users often know others who might like to join oDesk. We offer basic Invite a Friend feature to send them an email containing a referral link. If your friend follows the link and registers, you could earn a referral bonus!
- Go to Payments > Referrals.
- Enter your friend's email address in the Invite a Friend box at the right. Invitations must be sent one email address at a time.
- Press the Send button. Your friend will receive an email from "oDesk Notification" with the subject line "Invitation to join oDesk". The email includes your name, some basic information about oDesk and your referral URL as the link to accept the invitation.
Only invitations accepted by the users are tracked in your referrals activity.
We keep track every user who registers through your referral links, feeds and invitations.
- Go to Payments > Referrals.
- Select the Activity tab.
- You can see who has registered, the date they signed up, how much they've earned or paid on oDesk and whether you've received a bonus for that user yet.
Only users who register are tracked, not every visitor who clicks your referral URL.
