Word of mouth exists here, quietly

The assumption that a private transaction cannot generate word of mouth is wrong, and it costs earners who believe it. Buyers discuss this exactly the way people discuss any service they cannot ask their friends about: in forums, group chats and reply threads, under handles, at some remove from the purchase.

You will almost never see it happen. Enquiries that arrive already knowing your format and your price came from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually another buyer.

Why the same few names keep coming up

Recommendation in an anonymous market is not a popularity contest. It is risk reduction between strangers.

Someone asking "has anyone actually used one of these" wants a name that will not embarrass the person who supplies it. So the names that get passed on are the ones that are easy to vouch for without qualification: predictable format, price that was what it said, delivered when it said, nothing weird.

This selects for boringness rather than brilliance. An earner who is excellent four times in five and strange the fifth time does not get recommended, because the recommender is carrying the reputational cost of the fifth time. Consistency across jobs is therefore worth more to your referral flow than any single outstanding delivery, which is an unglamorous thing to be true and is true anyway.

What is actually being repeated

A referral is a sentence, not a rating. "She does a written one, about a page, comes back same day, twenty-odd" is a complete and useful recommendation.

Which means your format description is the thing being quoted. If a buyer cannot summarise what you sell in one clause, they cannot pass it on, and a vague listing is a referral that dies in someone's drafts. Naming the format, the length and the turnaround in your first line is not a conversion tactic; it is the text your future referrers will use.

Things that suppress referral

Being unbookable when the referral lands. A recommendation has a short half-life, and a name that turns out to have a two-week queue gets replaced with the next name in the thread.

Prices that move often. A quoted price that is no longer true makes the recommender look careless, and they stop.

Anything that requires explanation. Complicated tiering, conditional pricing and "message me for details" all break the chain, because the referrer will not do that work on your behalf.

You cannot measure it, so stop trying to

There is no clean attribution here and there will not be. Referral shows up as enquiries that skip the usual questions, arrive in clusters, and mention a format you never advertised in the exact words you used once.

Note the pattern, do not build a scheme on it. Formal referral incentives sit badly in a private trade, because they ask a buyer to disclose participation in something they are being discreet about. Disclosure can also become a formal duty: the FTC's endorsement guidance says a connection that a significant minority of consumers would not expect, and that would affect how they weigh a recommendation, should be disclosed clearly and conspicuously.

Two adjacent things belong elsewhere. The etiquette of how buyers approach and discuss commissioning is covered from their side, and it is the clearest picture available of the conversations you are not in. Buyers arriving via referral have frequently already tried the free automated tools and are being pointed at a person precisely because those did not answer the question - the technical reason they do not is set out here.

The practical instruction is short. Be describable in one clause, be reachable, keep the price stable long enough to be quoted, and accept that the best thing you can do about word of mouth is make yourself easy to repeat. The rest of what converts an enquiry once it arrives is in the account of what buyers scan on a profile, and on the platform side, how a recommended name is actually found again is described on Rate Cock's judges page.