Refural’s approach to the question of how to pass along clients is simple enough. A business or individual can post a listing on the web site for free, noting the types of referrals they’re interested in, as well as the compensation they’re willing to offer for each. That compensation varies from $25 per lead to well over $100. Refural users can search for businesses by name or by keyword, and then send referral information to the company of their choice. The site screens each submission to make sure that it’s legitimate and complete, and then gives the business the option to accept and pay for the referral. Businesses are protected by being able to cancel payment if the referral proves false.

There are several ways that such a tool can help out a web worker. First of all, if you operate your own business — freelance or otherwise — it may be well worth your while to pay $25 or $50 for a referral that leads you to a client who will give you hundreds of dollars worth of work.

Refural does give you the option of setting provisions, like requiring that a referral must become a paying client in order to necessitate a finder’s fee. Even without that condition, if you have to pay for several referrals before you get a truly solid one, a good client may be able to cover the expense of several leads and still result in profit.

You also have an opportunity to make a little money by referring clients to others. Just last week, I was working on a blog for a client, who decided that he needed a fancier web site overall, including some Flash elements. Flash isn’t one of the services I offer, but my client asked me to give him a recommendation or two for companies that could handle his needs.

I searched a couple of keywords on Refural and found three different companies who would work, and who, based on their portfolios and client lists, I’d be comfortable sending him to. Each of these companies was offering $50 for a referral. I wouldn’t suggest sending a referral to any company that you wouldn’t be willing to work with yourself, but I found more than a few companies that fit that description listed with Refural.

There are a few things I hope to see as Refural evolves. Easier ways to check out a business before you send a referral is one crucial component. I used Google to check up on the businesses I was looking at, but having some direct links from Refural or other users would have made the whole process much easier.

How do you usually get/give referrals? Do you generally offer compensation for leads or referrals? Do you expect it from others?

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How much are you willing to pay for your favorite web apps and services? That’s the key question to which every app developer wants an answer. It seems as if the provider of every once-free service is now pondering ways to make money and extract revenue from their members, which makes sense when you consider that they are, after all, businesses.

Remember that old adage, you get what you pay for? Will we continue to see more of our favorite free services following this model of offering stripped down freemium accounts along with feature-rich premium plans? Will online advertising ever allow these sites to generate enough revenue to avoid going this route?

Proven Winners

Here are a couple of services that have found the right formula for success when it comes to charging their members. There might be some valuable lessons learned by examining these successful services to see how they managed to get their users to take out their wallets rather than their pitchforks and torches.

Flickr was one of the first sites to capitalize on the fact that its members needed its services. They knew that people love their photos and they would be more than willing to pay a small fee for the convenience of storing and sharing their precious collections online. The paid accounts offered a few other bells and whistles, too, which only made the decision to pay easier.

Evernote is another service that was clever enough to jump on a need it knew its members would pay for — storing notes and information in the cloud, and then having them accessible via the web from their desktop and mobile devices.

When the iPhone was released with its feeble notes app, Evernote swooped in with its own much more fully featured app, which allowed even more users to tap into their service, and thus into their wallets.

Contenders or Pretenders

Here are a few services that show promise as they venture into paid subscription territory from the freemium universe. They originally hooked their users with totally free service, and only later announced their membership plans. Time will tell if they made the right move.

Jott emerged on the scene with an ambitious service that allowed its members to save their audio notes to the web via their mobile device. It also cross-posted to other services such as Twitter, Facebook and Remember the Milk. For the longest time it was free and in beta, then it announced its premium plans. There’s still a free plan but it’s extremely limited. Many members opted out, but many of them stuck around for one of the new paid plans.

Box also enticed members with free online storage but then later added premium plans with greater features such as larger file size for uploads (25 MB vs 1 GB, for example) and much more storage space (1 GB for free accounts vs. 30 GB for Business accounts).

While there are a slew of online storage services comparable to box.net (including some free ones with much larger storage), Box has wisely continued to innovate and has released many new features and options to make its service stand out. For example, its ability to work with your desktop applications as well as mobile devices is very handy. It has also released its own online apps to create documents and save them directly to your account.

Dropbox is another online storage service. It’s similar to Box but it does things a little differently. It provides the ability to automatically synchronize your files from multiple computers and provides twice the space of box.net for free accounts (2 GB). It also has premium accounts for far greater amounts of data.

Services That Will Start Charging Someday

Hulu is extremely popular these days. It remains free, but look for it to trot out some premium services soon. The companies behind it, NBC and ABC/Disney, are no slouches when it comes to making a buck, so hold on to your wallets. Clear signs of its financial plans is the way it has thwarted boxee’s attempts to share its content with its user base. The message is “No pay, no play”.

Yes, even the red-hot popular media darling Twitter has been struggling with the subject matter of monetization. Its difficulties with discovering a way to make money have been analyzed to death by countless financial experts and business gurus. It has looked at charging users for premium services, implementing advertisements and charging third party services for access to its API. Ultimately, no one knows how Twitter will cash in on all of its recent media coverage. No matter what it does, they will become the perfect case study in courses for future web entrepreneurs.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, most sites will fail if they aren’t careful when it comes to charging for their services. Recession or not, there are only so many services anyone can pay for, no matter how slick the interface or how many bells and whistles they offer. However, they also need to conduct themselves as a business and find a way to pay the bills.  At the end of the day, it’s always going to come down to a question quality of service and quantity of need.

Do you use mostly free services, or mostly pay? What factors help convince you that a service is in fact worth paying for?

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