The Power of referrals

In the latest issue of the Perl Weekly I mentioned I'll need to find new ways to promote the Perl Weekly. I am not sure if because of that but Alexandr Gomoliako has sent two one-liners to the Moscow Perl Mongers and Kiev Perl Mongers resulting in about 50 new subscribers.

I think we, in the Perl community, though maybe this is the same in general among programmers and IT personnel, we greatly underestimate the power of recommendation and referral. Maybe its only me, but I think we dislike the testimonials as we feel they are artificial. I am quite sure in many cases they really are.

That's why it is very important that you personally recommend things you like to the people who know and trust you.

That can be the Perl Weekly or ack, YAPC::NA or the Dancer web framework.

One-click recommendations

A recommendation can be the very small thing of clicking on a "like" (or "recommend") button of Facebook, the G+ button of Google+, the ++ buttons on MetaCPAN or the similar buttons of Reddit or Hacker News.

Two-click recommendations

There are a few slightly more involved recommendations that need 2 or even 3 clicks of the mouse. These can be things like posting or sharing on Reddit, Hacker News, Google+, Facebook, Twitter and other places.

While these requires slightly more effort on your side, they also have a lot more impact.

More involved recommendations

Then there are many other channels to recommend things such as the e-mails sent by Alexandr Gomoliako, the blog post Steve Dickinson wrote about Citrus Perl and OSX where he also mentioned the Perl Weekly or the perlverse writing by Mark Keating.

I really would like to thank you all. These recommendations brought in 74 new subscribers in less than 3 days!

All that, while most of the world is on Holiday.

Facebook widgets

I added a Facebook widget at the bottom of the Perl Weekly where you can recommend the Perl Weekly. I did not know that Facebook allows the buttons to display "recommend" instead of "like". I think this fits better how we, tech people like to think about things.

I also think, that showing the little pictures of people you know who already recommend a page is very powerful in establishing trust in services you don't know yet. Facebook got that quite right.

Anyway, I digress.

Conclusion?

The thing is, if you like something, you can help by recommending it.

You have a lot of power in your keyboard and mouse!