Rbate's Services for Consumer Helpers

If you're a publisher, broadcaster, retailer, or service provider whose work helps people make purchasing decisions, Rbate offers you another source of income besides charging your users, running advertising, or selling products. All the while looking after your most important asset — your reputation.

This income can be earned by both your online media and your offline publications & services — whenever they assist a product purchaser. Examples are an article, tool, or clip that concerns one or more products, product categories, companies, or topics , or a service that offers advice, demonstrations, or product trials .

Please read on to see how Rbate can help your business thrive in the new media and retail landscape.

What Rbate Offers

Your work helps people make decisions. But until now you haven't been able to directly earn income from doing this.

Instead you've had to either:

• Charge up-front for your material or services, which is becoming more risky as publishing has become easier, as new avenues of mobile entertainment have emerged, as sharing has become more important, and and as audiences have become more global.

• Accept payment for surrounding your content with material that you don't control, or for placing material within your content or service.

  This often means that you're presenting your readers, viewers, or listeners with distracting, unreliable, or incomplete information. It can also require you to employ sales staff who have a direct business relationship with organizations that you write about. Advertising is paying more and more poorly as consumers increasingly avoid it, and as advertisers use other means to get their message out .

• Accept affiliate payments for products that you sell. This challenges your independence, is only possible on your online properties, encourages a focus on individual products rather than general information, and only earns you income for a small fraction of the people you help — those who buy from that vendor through your link.
• Sell products. But if you're a full-service retailer you earn no income from the customers you assist but who buy from a discount outlet . While if you're an information source, selling products muddies your brand.

You can expand and diversify your income stream by becoming an Rbate Helper. This allows you to get paid when your work helps people choose products . This is done in a way that supports and proclaims your independence.

How It Works

All you have to do is to register as an Rbate Helper, place a touch-friendly button on your Web material , and display a short code on your printed or video material .

When someone uses Rbate.com to claim a manufacturer's cash rebate, they're asked to list the sources of information that helped them choose the product they've bought .

If the purchaser was helped by printed or broadcast material, they can enter the Rbate code you've displayed on it . For other types of help , the rebate claimer doesn't type anything — they simply select a set of helpful sources from a ranked list of relevant material and services that they've accessed .

The helpful sources of information that were cited by the rebate claimer each receive an appropriate share of the following payments:

1. Any donation the claimer chooses to make from their rebate . Donations that draw from cashback entitlements are more likely than those straight from the purchaser's wallet, particularly as the purchaser has just stated that the material benefited them.
2. Any fee that the purchaser had agreed to pay from their rebates if and when a particular service or item of yours helped them . This allows you to directly charge for your material and services, without erecting a paywall.

3. A bonus payment that the manufacturer of the purchased product can offer to organizations that have helped their customers .

   If you don't believe that the public will trust your organization to prevent bonus payments affecting the assessments you make, you can choose to forgo them, a choice that Rbate publishes on our website . And even if you do choose to accept such payments, Rbate still allows you to control what you're told about available bonus offers, and how you're paid those offers (both of which choices Rbate also publishes, to which you can append an editorial policy statement).

Note that if you let Rbate know about any work you've syndicated or collaborated on, you will receive an appropriate share of income from this work, even if you weren't the one who delivered it .

Other Benefits

Each time one of your works is cited as helpful by a purchaser, that work gets ranked higher in Rbate's unique Purchasing Help Search Engine, whether or not you've earned income. This makes it more likely for both the cited material and your other material to be found by people specifically looking for help .

As well, Rbate users can opt to receive email or Twitter alerts when you list new sources of advice in their areas of interest. Your Rbate account allows you to monitor which of your works people are finding most helpful (which is more useful data than just page views).

People usually consider material to be most helpful when it's personalized, easy to access, and easy to digest. Rbate provides one way for you to cheaply offer such material: An Rbate Helper account can be used to build and publish automated purchase advisors, from which you can earn Rbate income.

The Next Step

People are craving information that makes it easy for them to find the product that best meets their needs. But what's out there falls well short. Rbate makes it more profitable to create media and services that meet this demand. This new source of income can help protect your business from the major changes occurring in media, advertising, and retailing.

If you think your organization is eligible to become an Rbate Helper, please investigate further by applying for an Rbate Helper account. There's no charge.

If you have any questions, please search the list of frequently-asked questions, or you can contact us.