Using ?ref= links to send people somewhere other than the sign-up form

You have an affiliate code and you have used it perhaps four times. Each time the link dropped a stranger onto a sign-up form, and each time it went quiet. That is not the code failing. That is the landing failing. You asked someone to make an account before they had any idea what the thing does, what it costs, or whether it handles the one product type they care about.

A sign-up form is a poor first impression

A sign-up form is the end of a decision, not the start of one. It shows an email field and a password field and assumes the reader has already decided. Most people who click your link have not. They are somewhere earlier: wondering what it costs, wondering whether it does bookings, wondering whether they would have to move a catalogue across from somewhere else.

The genuinely hard part is that you only get one link per post, and you cannot see which of those questions the reader has. A story sticker, a video description, a line in a newsletter — one URL, one guess. Guess wrong and the reader bounces without ever telling you why.

So make the guess deliberately. Because ?ref= works across the features, pricing and FAQ pages, you can choose the page that fits the moment you are writing in, and your code is still attached when the reader eventually decides to sign up.

Match the landing page to the question

Think about the last five times someone replied to one of your posts about store.fan. The replies cluster. People ask about fees, about whether their kind of product is supported, and about moving from wherever they are now. There is a page for each of those, and each one can carry your code.

Building the link

This takes about two minutes and you only do it once. Keep the results in a note on your phone so you are never building a URL from memory while filming.

1. 1Open the affiliate section of your store.fan dashboard and copy your code. Your short link is join.store.fan/yourcode.
2. 2Write down the three questions you get asked most about the platform. Be honest — they are usually fees, whether it does your product type, and switching.
3. 3Pick the page that answers each one: pricing, features, the FAQ, the migration page or a landing page.
4. 4Add ?ref=yourcode to the end of that URL. If the URL already has a question mark in it, join yours with &ref=yourcode instead.
5. 5Open each finished link in a private browser window to check it loads the page you meant.
6. 6Keep the short join.store.fan link for spoken places — podcasts, video, anywhere someone has to type it from memory.

What this looks like over a quiet month

Say you write a small newsletter and you mention store.fan twice in a month, once in a piece about delivering digital files and once in a piece about taking bookings. Instead of one sign-up link in both, the first goes to the features page and the second to the pricing page, both with your code on the end. Nothing about your writing changes. The reader lands somewhere that continues the thought they were already having.

Some of those readers will sign up straight away, some will take a month, and some never will. What matters for you is that the ones who do arrived warm and your code was attached the whole way. Commission then sits on the ladder: the more of your referrals who paid in the last 30 days, the higher your band, from 25% up to 50%, and it runs for each referral's first 12 months. Nobody can promise you a number. The mechanism is simply better when the first page was useful.

The mistake most people make

The common mistake is treating the link as the message. People paste it under a post with no sentence around it, or drop it into a group chat cold. A link works when it finishes a thought you have already started — you explained how you deliver a file in ten seconds, and the link goes to the page that shows the delivery feature. The second mistake is hiding that it is a referral link. Say so. You are recommending a tool you use and you earn a commission if the person subscribes; that sentence has never cost anyone a sale, and the alternative is finding out you were quiet about it later.

None of this is clever growth hacking. It is just refusing to send a curious person to a form. Pick the page that answers the question, put your code on the end, and let the page do the explaining you would otherwise have to do in replies.