Greater than 3 minutes, my friend!
Introducing Smartcat Friends, the Growth-Focused Affiliate Program Growing together with our most dedicated users
Today we are excited to announce Smartcat Friends, a program that lets our most dedicated users grow together with us by sharing their love for the platform with their friends and followers.
The Values
We love our users. They are advanced, they are ambitious, and they do not shy away from using technology for their growth.
Most importantly, they share our core values, namely that:
- Technology must be free — you just can’t force translators into buying software that they are bound to use for their work.
- Technology must enable growth — it must let you constantly improve by setting and achieving new goals.
- Technology must serve humans, not the other way around — translators’ interests must always be at the head of the table.
We can rightfully call these users our friends — for friendship is about sharing the same values, right?
We have a lot of friends — and we are grateful to everyone who has joined our growing community.
But we want to bring our friendship to a new level, for friendship is also about helping each other grow.
That’s why today we’re launching Smartcat Friends, a program that will let us grow together — and help grow people that we care about.
The Program
The essence of Smartcat Friends is very simple and consists of five steps:
- You sign up with the program here and receive your “Friend’s URL” along with further instructions (read more: How do I become a Smartcat Friend?).
- You invite others to join Smartcat using your Friend’s URL (read more: How do I invite people to join Smartcat under Smartcat Friends? and “Spreading the Love” below).
- Your invitees become active users by translating a certain volume within a certain time frame (read more: What are the activation criteria for invitees under Smartcat Friends?).
- You receive $5 to $50 on your bonus account for each activated user, and they do, too (read more: How much money do I receive for inviting a new user under Smartcat Friends?).
- You spend the bonus money on the platform to (read more: “Growing Together” below):
- Purchase paid services at current prices.
- Get up to a 5% premium on the orders you execute via Smartcat Marketplace.
- Share them with any other user at your discretion.
- Place orders on the Smartcat marketplace.
Spreading the Love
Of course, the easiest way to benefit from the program is to just tell about Smartcat to your friends. Then you can use the few dozens “bonus bucks” you get to just purchase machine translation/OCR pages, or get an additional $5 for each $100 order you execute on Smartcat.
However, we challenge you to think bigger. For instance, you can:
- Write an article about Smartcat. And no, it doesn’t have to be a panegyric. We believe that your honest opinion is what will work best.
- Put a special “I’m on Smartcat” page on your website. This means $50 for your every client who joins and becomes active on Smartcat after browsing your page!
- Promote Smartcat in your job applications. When you apply for a job on any website, propose the client to hire you via Smartcat — $50 again!
- Come up with your own amazing way to spread your love for Smartcat!
Growing Together
Now, suppose you’ve gathered a substantial amount on your bonus account. What do you do with all this bonus money?
Become a customer!
Many translators would like to try themselves “on the other side” — here’s your chance!
Next time you have an order that you would otherwise turn down for any reasons (lack of time, interest, specialization) — don’t. Instead, go to Smartcat and use your bonus money to hire your colleague who is more interested in this. You’ll help yourself, you’ll help your peer, you’ll help the whole ecosystem — all of us will grow together!
What else?
The affiliate program is just the first step in our quest of turning our most happy users into brand advocates. We’ll be continuously improving the program to make it even more attractive for our friends.
Once you sign up with the program, you will be added to a newsletter where we will announce the hottest updates on it.
By the way, if you have any suggestions or ideas, do post them on our forum — we will read every message thoroughly. And, of course, feel free to ask any questions you might have.
The Takeaway
As we said, one of our core values is to help our users not just use a tool they have, but grow through it.
Smartcat Friends is a way for all of us to grow together. You grow by turning the bonus money into business development opportunities. Smartcat grows by getting new happy users.
Finally, the whole translators’ community grows through its members getting more jobs through a platform that is built for them. A platform that lets them work in their own names and on their own terms. A platform that is here for you.
Yeats once wrote, “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”
Let’s meet new friends together! Click here to become a Smartcat Friend now!
Nixie Adams 
Gert Van Assche 
Yuliya Kinash 
Interesting approach to growing a community, Vladimir. Let’s see where it takes you. Just one question because I feel like some of our readers might ask the same thing: there’s no way to “cash out” as in withdraw the money you earn by referring people?
And another tricky question: Why should someone refer work to SmartCAT when they can simply contact their peers directly using other methods (like good old email)?
No cash-out for now — we want our users to grow together with us, and it seems like a great opportunity to do so.
As for the second one, the answer seems obvious. If you have $100 worth of “bonus money”, and you get a $100 ($110, $120, …) order from a customer, you can use your $100 (which basically cost you nothing) to have the translation done by a SmartCAT freelancer, and, after some editing/proofreading, submit it to the customer, earning pure $100 (minus editing/proofreading effort) in the process. Seems like good business, no?:)