For just over 20 years, I have been helping small businesses with their website maintenance and marketing. In 2019 I started to think about early retirement. Until this point, I had basically charged an hour’s money for an hour’s work.
I realised then that if I stopped working, I would also have to stop ‘billing’ my clients, so I started to look around to see what I could do that wasn’t directly connected to my actual working hours.
By way of coincidence, I had previously applied for a business credit card, as I was fed up of using my own card and having to charge everything across to the business. Anyway, the company that provided the card – Capital On Tap – sent me an offer whereby they would pay me £75 if I introduced someone else that opened an account with them.
So, I started telling my friends and contacts about the offer, because it meant that they also got £75 for opening the new account.
I then started promoting the offer on the UK Business Forum website, and this started to gain some traction. However, even though I was paying for this service, they had some funny rules about what you could promote. So sometimes they allowed my ad, and sometimes they removed it.
I got fed up with the unreliability and apparent randomness of their interpretation of their own rules, so decided to set up a page which I could host myself and which no one else had control over. That’s when the www.free75.co.uk website was born in May 2020.
This started off as just one page – with all of the details about the offer and the answers to the most common questions I was asked about it.
I then started to push everyone I could think of to that page. It didn’t take any other work from me. Basically the page visitors would decide themselves whether they wanted to open an account or not. If they did, they’d do that directly on Capital On Tap’s website, but would use my referral code.
I would just get a credit into my account whenever one of them had used their card for the first time. This is what it looks like when you get what they call a ‘Goodwill Referral’:
So, up to the 5th of July 2022 I’ve had a total of 348 goodwill bonuses – which is at least £26,100.
I say at least, because occasionally Capital On Tap do other offers where they pay you £100 for a referral instead of £75, or a larger lump sum bonus for getting the next 3 or 5 referrals.
The website was always a single page, but in Spring 2022 I decided to add another page so I could give my own honest review of the credit card account, because I’ve been really pleased with it. I then also added privacy and T&C pages to keep the Internet Police and keyboard warriors happy.
So, don’t let anyone tell you that a one page website can’t make money.
It all comes down to the basics of getting the right message to the right people at the right time. If that can all be done with a single web page, then so be it – although I appreciate that more often than not you would need a larger website to get the full message across.
Interesting guest post. Not what I was expecting at all.