DAP offers a number of affiliate statistics on the “Affiliates > Reports” page.

Here’s how it looks as of DAP v4.2.1.

1) Email Id of Affiliate

This is the field where you would enter the email id of an affiliate, if you want to generate a report specifically for an affiliate. If you leave it blank, the report will include all affiliates.

2) “From” & “To” Dates

By default, if you leave these fields blank, then DAP will assume “today’s” date – i.e., the date whenever you’re viewing this page.

3) View Performance Summary

This is the most detailed report available. This is the report being viewed in the above screenshot. For a given time period, for a given number of affiliates (“all” affiliates if (1) is left blank above), it shows…

• Affiliate Id
• Full Name
• Email id
• Clicks generated during selected period
• Referrals generated (includes total of both Free and Paid referrals): If the referred member actually bought something, it constitutes a “Paid” referral. If they simply signed up, say, for your free newsletter or free report or free product, then it is counted as a “Free” referral.
• Commissions Earned: This is the actual amount credited to the affiliate’s account during the selected period
• Sales Generated: This is the amount of the actual sale (purchase) generated for your membership site.
• Earnings Per Click (EPC): This is an indicator of how well your web site is converting clicks into signups/members. So if an affiliate sent you 100 clicks (on their affiliate link), and 5% of them signed up for your “FaceBook Secrets” membership product by paying $10 each, it means a total revenue of $10 x 5 = $50. And if you were paying 30% affiliate commissions for the product, then the affiliate earned $15 in total.Total clicks sent: 100
  Total affiliate earnings from those 100 clicks: $15
  Earnings Per Click (EPC) = $15/100 = $0.15 – which means, 15 cents per click.The higher the EPC, the easier it will be for you to attract other JV partners and super-affiliates.

4) View Earnings Details

This shows the breakdown of each purchase referred by each affiliate. It’s a detailed view of the affiliate earnings, that lists each and every transaction (order) in the system that was referred by affiliates, all generated for the selected time period. It displays…

• Affiliate Id
• Full Name
• Email Id
• Product (name) that was purchased by referred buyer
• Referral Date (when affiliate was associated with buyer)
• Date/Time of actual transaction
• Trans Id: This is the transaction (order) id for the actual purchase
• Earning Type (L: Lead, S: Sale): Says what type of a commission credit it was – whether it was a “Pay Per Sale” credit or a “Pay Per Lead” credit.
• Id of User Referred: This tells you the actual user id of the buyer who was referred by the affiliate.

5) View Payments

This shows all payments made to affiliates during the period.

6) Refund Period

This is a config setting that you can change in Setup > Config. This is what drives which orders are picked up for affiliate payment. See this article for more details.

7) View Due Payments as of <date>

This is the MAIN button you should click to start the process of paying your affiliates each month (or however often it is that you pay affiliates). When you click this button, it will show you a report (see screenshot below) of commissions owed on all orders in the system UNTIL  X days ago, where X is your “Refund Period”.

So if today is 10/01/2011, and you have a refund period of 60 days, then DAP will only consider orders prior to 60 days as of today. Which means, orders up to 08/01/2011 (of course, depending on how many days in a month, you may not exactly end up with 08/01/2011, because it goes an actual 60 days back from today – and sometimes, the report will stop at the 2nd or 3rd day of the month – like 08/03/2011. But that’s ok, don’t worry about it). You just focus on paying your affiliates on whatever day you wish to make the payment.

So when you click on this button, DAP will bring you a summary report of all affiliates, and how much they’re owed today, for all transactions referred by them as of 08/01/2011 (as per this example).

And when you click on the “Export These Affiliates For Payment” button shown in the screenshot above, DAP will select and mark those affiliates as being exported for payment.

And DAP will show you Paypal Mass-Pay Ready text report, with the affiliate info and the commission amount info already filled in and ready to go. If you’re paying via Paypal Mass-Pay, then all you need is this file. See this post for details.

NOTE: Being exported for payment doesn’t mean that you’ve actually paid them. Exporting affiliates for payment only means that DAP has now “set aside” those affiliates for payment, and you still need to tell DAP that you’ve actually paid your affiliates.

This is important, because you might export affiliates for payment on the first of the month, but it may take you a day or two (or 10) to actually make the payment – especially if you’re sending out Checks.

So once you’ve made the payment either through Paypal mass-pay, or by mailing your affiliates physical checks, then you need to tell DAP that you’ve actually sent out the payments, which is what you’ll do in the step below.

8 ) Mark Affiliates from <export> as Paid

This is where you will select the most recent export from the drop down (see #8 in first image at the very top), and click the “Paid” button. This is what actually lets DAP know that you’ve actually made the payment, and only after you do this, will the affiliates see the payment show up in the “Payments” section on their “Affiliate Info” page.

9) Archived Reports

This is just a report that shows you past commission payment exports.

Please note that an affiliate will get their commissions credited only if there’s an actual payment (transaction) in the system for that purchase.

So if you have marked someone as “PAID”, for whatever reason, then even if there is an affiliate associated with that user, then the affiliate is not going to get credited any actual commissions because there is no payment in the system.

Here’s how to manually credit affiliates for a sign-up or purchase…

1) Add Transaction If None Exists

If there is no payment associated with the purchase, and you’ve marked the user as “FREE” or “PAID”, then you must first enter an order (transaction) into the system. So search for the user by email id on the Users > Manage page, and on their row for that Product, click on “Add Trans” (which stands for “Add Transaction”).

2) Add Transaction Amount – If None Exists

When you click on the “Add Trans” link, you will see a small popup appear (see image below) that allows you to manually enter an order. So if the purchase was for say $97, then you would enter “97″ or “97.00″ in the “Order Amount” field and click on “Submit”.

3) Verifying Order Id

Once you’ve entered a manual order, the “Trans Id” column will change from “PAID” to an actual transaction (or order) id – in the example below, it turns to Transaction Id “3″.

4) Give Manual Credit To Affiliate

Now that there’s an order in the system, it’s time to manually give credit to the affiliate. Now on the same User row, scroll all the way to the end, and under the “Aff Id” column, if you already see a number, then it means some other affiliate is already associated with this purchase. You cannot change that affiliate id at this time.

But if you see a “+” (plus sign) there instead of a number, it means that no affiliate is associated with that purchase yet, and you will be able to give credit for that purchase or sign up to any affiliate in the system.

So when you click on the “+” sign, you will see a small popup come up, which allows you to enter the affiliate id (must be a number) of any user in the system. Please note that ever user has a unique number (“User Id”) associated with their account. That’s the number you should enter here.

5) Verifying Manual Credit

Let’s say you gave credit to Affiliate Id 5 for this purchase. So now you should see the “+” sign at the end of the row change to “5″. That means, user #5 has been given affiliate credit for this purchase. So assuming you have already set up affiliate commissions for this product (under Affiliates > Set Commissions ), then at the top of the next hour, when the hourly cron job runs, the affiliate commission will be “credited” the affiliate’s account depending on the commissions set up for the product.

WARNING

Sometimes you may enter a manual transaction for a purchase at the same time DAP is processing an automated transaction for that same purchase.

That means, there are now two transactions in DAP for the same purchase – which can cause problems in accounting.

At the very least, you may end up paying double commissions to the affiliate who referred the user, because all affiliate commissions are calculated from sales, and if you have two entries for the same purchase, then the affiliate will get paid twice.

So if you see two credits for the affiliate, you must note that it will not be for the same transaction, but for different transactions.

So be careful when you’re entering Manual transactions. That is only for when there is no way to automate it in DAP, and you’re unable to bring the transaction into DAP automatically.

If you see two affiliate commission credits (one for the automated transaction that DAP picked up, and one for the Manual transaction that you entered), then just refund the manual transaction in DAP. There will probably be a change to the user’s access because of the refund. So make a note of the current access of the user BEFORE you do the refund, and then AFTER you’ve processed the refund, go back to the User’s details on the Users > Manage page, and manually adjust their access to make sure it’s accurate.

DAP’s affiliate program works the same regardless of which DAP-supported payment processor or shopping cart you’re using.

DAP does not directly make any affiliate payments. Instead, at the beginning of each month (or however often you wish to pay your affiliates), with one click on the Affiliates > Run Reports page, DAP will give you a list of all affiliates to whom payment is due, and the actual amount due to each one of them.

The format of the payment list that DAP provides you with, is already “Paypal Mass-Pay Ready” – which means, you could simply upload the file that DAP gives you, upload it to your Paypal account, and then pay all affiliates in one click (details further below).

Or if you don’t wish to pay by Paypal, and wish to use any other form of offline payment (like sending them a physical “check” in the mail, doing wire-transfers, etc), you’re free to use any external means for paying your affiliates. Once you have paid (by Paypal, or other external means), you just come back to DAP and mark all those affiliates as “Paid” – which is when DAP actually reports to all of those affiliates that a payment has been sent to them. Until the actual payment is made, they only see that they are owed a certain amount.

How To Pay Your Affiliates

1) Go to “Affiliates > Run Reports”
2) Click on “View Due Payments as of mm-dd-yyyy”
3) DAP will bring up a list of affiliates to be paid. Click on “Export affiliates for payment”
4) DAP will create an export of only those affiliates. Only those affiliates can be paid now, as per DAP.
5) You take the exported list that DAP gives you. Pay them however you choose to.
6) Once you’ve actually paid them (or sent them the payment), come back to the same page, pick the previously exported list from “Mark affiliates from ……. as Paid” drop down (your last un-paid export will be shown in the drop-down list).
7) Mark that export as “Paid”.

Making Payments Via Paypal Mass-Pay

1.Copy the export that DAP gives you and save it as text file on your desktop, with a file name like “February 2011 Commissions.txt”

2. Log in to your Paypal account

3. Click on “Send Money”

4. Click on”Make a Mass Payment”

5. Upload previously saved text file on this next screen. You may also enter a custom subject and body for the email that Paypal will send to all those receiving a payment.

6. Follow remaining instructions and hit “Send”.

[WARNING: Paypal frowns on 2-tier affiliate programs. So if you want to run a 2-tier affiliate program, make sure you're not using Paypal to accept payments or make affiliate payments - otherwise you're putting your Paypal account at risk.]

In a “1-Tier” affiliate program, when a buyer makes a purchase, the affiliate who referred the buyer is the only one who gets paid an affiliate commission. Which is why it’s called “1-tier”, because there’s only one level of commissions paid.

However, in a “2-tier” affiliate program, the “Affiliate’s Affiliate” (2nd level) can also get paid a portion of the sale as a commission.

So let’s take this example:

You are selling Product A that costs $100.

You’ve set up your commission structure for Product A as follows:

Tier 1: 50% Per Sale

Tier 2: 10% Per Sale

Joe Customer is referred by Charlie to your web site. Joe went on to purchase Product A for which commissions are set up above.

So Charlie (tier-1 affiliate) gets paid 50% of the sale - which is $50.

Now, normally a 1-tier affiliate program would stop there, and that would be the end of affiliate commissions for that purchase. But you have set up 2 tiers.

So now DAP looks at who referred Charlie, the affiliate. It finds that David originally referred Charlie to your web site (regardless of how Charlie got in to your membership site).

So now David (tier-2 affiliate) gets paid 10% of the sale – which is $10.

So for that one sale of $100, $50 was paid to Charlie, and $10 was paid to David, which totals $60.

So $40 is your earnings, as the site owner.

How To Set It Up

The 2-tier or “n” tier setup is the exact same as the 1-tier setup.

Only difference is, set up a new record on the “Affiliates > Set Commissions” page for each tier – one for Tier 1, one for Tier 2, and so on.

Overview

DAP’s built-in affiliate module makes every one of your members an affiliate by default.

If they have an account in DAP (on your site), it means they have a User Id in the system, which means they are also instant and automatic affiliates – regardless of whether you actually choose to show them their affiliate link or not, regardless of whether you have set up commissions for products or not.

Now obviously, if you have not setup commissions for your Products, and are not showing them the affiliate details page, maybe because you’re not using DAP as your affiliate program manager, then of course they won’t get to see their affiliate link, which means they won’t be promoting your DAP affiliate link.

If you want to show them their affiliate link and other affiliate stats, then you simply need to create a “Affiliate Info” page with the merge tag %%AFFDETAILS%% , as explained here.

If your site is YourSite.com , and if your member’s user id is 123, then their default affiliate link is:

http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=123

So basically, their user id (123) is also their affiliate id.

If you’re the DAP Admin, then your user id is probably 1. In which case, your own affiliate id for your site would then be:

http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=1

How The DAP Affiliate Program Works

1. You first set up the commissions for each product on the Affiliates > Commissions page in your DAP Admin Dashboard.
2. Your affiliate takes their affiliate link http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=123 and promotes it on their blog, web site, FaceBook, Twitter, etc.
3. When prospect/visitor clicks on their affiliate link and arrives at your web site, a cookie gets set on the prospect’s computer with the affiliate’s id (123 in this example).
4. The user then goes on to purchase a product from your web site.
5. Immediately after purchase, they are redirected to the member’s area.
6. At this time, the affiliate is instantly given credit for the new member referral. Please note that at this time, the only thing that is recorded by DAP, is that new member with user id 456 has been referred by affiliate 123. And if you have set up a “Pay Per Lead” commission, then it is instantly credited to the affiliate’s account. So if you had set up a “Pay Per Lead” of $1 per lead, then a sum of $1 is credited to affiliate 123′s account at this time.
7. If the affiliate were to log in to their account at this time, they will only see the credit for the “Lead” and not (yet) for the Sale.
8. Within an hour of the purchase, the DAP hourly cron job will run as usual (it runs at the top of every hour, 24 times a day).
9. When this hourly cron job runs, it will carefully comb through all purchases made recently, for which there is a recorded affiliate, go and see what kind of commissions have been set up for this product, see if there are any special overrides for the referring affiliate, identify the right commission (Pay-per-sale fixed or Pay-per-sale percentage), and then at that time, the referring affiliate’s account will be “credited” with the actual commission for the sale, if any. So if the purchase was for $100, and you have set up a “Pay-Per-Sale” commission of 33%, then $33 is “credited” to the referring affiliate’s account.
10. So if the affiliate were to view their affiliate info page, then they will see an new credit of $33 in their account.

Lifetime Affiliates

Once an affiliate is “tied” to a member’s account, that association is forever. And the member now forever belongs to this affiliate. So any future purchases made by this same member (using same account) will always result in commissions being credited to the same original affiliate, regardless of which other affiliate’s id they click on before making a purchase. See example below.

• Affiliate John refers customer Mary
• Mary buys, John gets affiliate commission
• A while (days, months or years) later, Mary clicks on a different affiliate link belonging to Paul
• Mary buys another product from your web site using the same email id as before
• John will still get the commission for the new product that Mary just bought, because John is the lifetime affiliate for Mary.
• So no matter how many times Mary makes a purchase, regardless of which affiliate link she used (even her own), John will get the commission every time, for life.

You already know that DAP has a built-in affiliate program, and everyone who joins your site (or gets a free or paid account) is automatically made into an “Instant Affiliate”.

DAP also lets you create an Affiliate Tool Box for your affiliates, with ready-to-use banners, emails, subjects, signatures and text links – all with their own personalized affiliate link embedded into it already.

So all they have to do is copy, paste, and hit send.

See the sample screen-shots below that show what our own affiliate tool box looks for DAP affiliates who wish to promote DigitalAccessPass.com to others.

Banners

Email Copy

Text Links

How To Create The Affiliate Tool Box

Create as many different pages you want on your blog – like “Banners”, “Email Swipe Copy” or “Text Links”.

Or create just one big page for all of this – like “Affiliate Tool Box”.

Download this text file which has all of the ready-made HTML code that you need to insert into the WordPress pages.

Feel free to modify the text as required, and be careful not to delete any of the special characters that are in there just for the formatting.

Download Sample Affiliate ToolBox Code

FOREWORD: DAP can only protect content on the same site where it is installed. So if you install DAP on SiteA.com, then DAP can only protect content (blog posts/pages and files) that are on SiteA.com. DAP on SiteA.com cannot protect content on SiteB.com

Now, let’s say you own a network of web sites, some sell a product, some sell a membership course, some sell a physical product, and some just exist to build a list.

So let’s say you have 10 sites in all.

And you want someone who’s an affiliate on Site A, to be an affiliate for all ten, and be able to get commissions if the person he referred goes on to purchase a product from any of your 10 web sites.

Yup, DAP can handle that. And here’s how…

Configuration #1

1) Install DAP on your main “Parent” site where you have all of your content that needs to be protected/delivered. Make sure all of your content for all of your sites is on this main “Parent” (hub) site.

2) You can then have multiple “Child” sites – completely different domains from your parent site – which are basically just “sales page only” sites. Of course you can have a wordpress blog on each of them and have as much content as you want. Just put the main content to be delivered on the Parent site.

2A) On each of these child sites, you can use any DAP-supported payment processors to sell your products. So for eg., on one “child” site, you can use ClickBank, on another, you can use Paypal, on another you use e-junkie, etc.

3) All buyers end up with an account on your “Parent” site, which is where they get to access their content too. You can set up multiple blogs on one site for different look & feel for all of your various products, and deliver content from the specific blog for the specific product. DAP can support multiple blogs on one site, so that’ll work fine.

4) Since all of your actual products are on one DAP installation, your affiliates can use the same affiliate link for promoting all of your “child” sites. Which means, anyone buying any product across your network, will result in a commission for your affiliate

5) Since all of your users are in one database, email marketing also becomes extremely simple. You can send autoresponders & broadcasts all from within DAP

6) And anyone purchasing any product across your entire network, instantly and automatically becomes a “global” affiliate – which means they can straightaway start promoting any of your web sites. So if your parent site is Parent.com, and you have 3 child sites called childA.com, childB.com and childC.com, then your affiliates’ global affiliate link would be:

http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234

Now if they wanted to promote childA.com, they just use the redirection feature of DAP like this:
http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=www.ChildA.com

Or if they want to point to a specific page on childA, they can do this:
http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=www.ChildA.com/specificpage.php

or
http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=www.ChildA.com/blog/specific-post/

Plus we’re coming up with a “N”-tier affiliate program in 4.0, which will make it even more powerful when you club it with the ‘global’ concept explained above, as every new member becomes a global affiliate, and will also get multi-tiered commissions across ALL purchases across ALL of your child sites.

DAP now supports Coupon codes – which again means your global affiliate will be able to use coupon codes for any product across your network. So the extensions are unlimited, and the possibilities are infinite.

Configuration #2

Parent.com has “dap” in its root folder.

Parent.com/site1/ is a blog for Site 1 which has all of the content for whatever is being sold on Site 1. Sales page can be the root of the “site1″ blog itself, or in a separate WordPress Page on that blog.

So you will have one blog per site, each installed as a separate WP installation, in sub-folders of Parent.com.

Parent.com/site1/
Parent.com/site2/
Parent.com/site3/
Parent.com/site4/

Each of the above blogs should have their own copy of the “DAP-WP-Livelinks” plugin.

But only one installation of the “dap” folder itself. DAP is in root.

Parent.com/dap/

The blogs must be in sub-folders of the main domain – they may not be in sub-domains.

So, in a nutshell…

• DAP enables to you have one, large, global “store”.
• This is also your content and affiliate hub, while unifying and standardizing content delivery for all of your products,
• This gives your members a “Single Sign-on” facility, where if they log in to your “Hub Store”, they basically never have to log in again
• All of the content can be made available from one “Content Delivery” site
• Your affiliate program goes “Global” – which means if you’re an affiliate for one site, you can promote all sites and all products in the network using just one affiliate link. Which will help you recruit more affiliates, and help get them excited about promoting your network sites.

what i wish to do is have a central dap install, that looks after all my sites and affiliate programs, of course i would like different site members to access the down load they bought in they same style of the site they bought i would like different site members to access the affiliate programs that they enrolled in affiliate program , but also let them taste my others, so each product wold have its own tools affiliate links, my current set up is a hep desk in my root folder, as that is generic name which will work for all my products, i wold then like to deliver products within this system so each has its own download pages , in its own style all im asking is do i need 10 wp blogs to do this or just one or none can blogs and pages be sub-domains or only folders ( you answered this in your last post ) thanks for your help

Response Time: 37 Minutes Mon 10 Jan 2011, 18:36pm

» Reply by: Ravi Jayagopal

Here’s how you would do it… Parent.com has “dap” in its root folder. Parent.com/site1/ is a blog for Site 1 which has all of the content for whatever is being sold on Site 1. Sales page can be the root of the “site1″ blog itself, or in a separate “WP Page” in that blog. So you will have one blog per site, each installed as a separate WP installation, in sub-folders of Parent.com Parent.com/site1/ Parent.com/site2/ Parent.com/site3/ Parent.com/site4/ Each of the above blogs have their own copy of the “DAP-WP-Livelinks” plugin. But only one installation of the “dap” folder itself. DAP is in root. Parent.com/dap/ Each of the blogs may not be sub-domains – must be sub-folders.

We are frequently asked, why should someone use DAP’s built-in affiliate program, rather than using ClickBank’s affiliate program.

Here’s the difference in a nutshell.

Advantage: DAP

When you use DAP’s built-in affiliate module, …

1. You don’t have to send your members over to Clickbank to sign up separately for an affiliate account
2. Every member (or buyer)  becomes (at your option, of course) an “automatic” and “instant” affiliate the second they purchase any product or membership level
3. You can do Pay-Per-Lead (can’t do that with CB)
4. You can choose your commission level to whatever you want (CB forces minimum & maximum commission percentages)
5. You control who signs up for your Affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
6. You can kick spammers and abusers out of your affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
7. If you use CB, then every person who arrives at your web site through another CB affiliate’s link, can easily screw the original affiliate, and end up purchasing your product through their own CB affiliate link. But your affiliates can’t screw other affiliates when you use DAP. So DAP helps you protect your affiliates’ commissions. Which means, your affiliates will promote you more happily and aggressively, because they know their commissions are safe.
8. CB is a bad choice of affiliate program in the IM and web-savvy niches, because everyone knows about CB, and everyone knows how to replace your affiliate nickname with theirs, and steal your affiliate’s commissions from right under your nose. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
9. If you use CB, if an affiliate didn’t get credited for a sale you know that they brought in (for whatever reason), there’s no way to manually credit that affiliate for the purchase. Using DAP, you can do this (starting v3.9)
10. You cannot credit or pay affiliates for offline payments with CB. You can do that with DAP (starting v3.9).

Advantage: ClickBank

Of course, you should also be aware of the flip side.

1. CB has a large built-in community of affiliates that you can take advantage of to promote your product (of course, actually finding them and getting them excited enough to promote you is another thing altogether)
2. CB takes care of handling commission payments and refunds and charge-backs – so it is less work for you as the admin.
3. When you use a 3rd party like CB, some affiliates may prefer that, especially if they don’t know you, don’t trust you to make the payments on time, or your site is new (or not popular yet).

Hope this helps.

This will be very useful to you if you own multiple DAP-Powered membership sites, and you want your affiliates to set affiliate cookies for multiple DAP sites all at once.

DAP allows your affiliates to set the cookie, and then redirect the visitor to any web site URL they want.

That second link could be yet another affiliate link from another DAP site, or any affiliate link for that matter.

This allows your affiliates the ability to drop their affiliate cookie on the visitor’s computer for multiple DAP sites. So if they visitor goes on to buy from any of the “network” sites (all powered by DAP), they will get the credit for the sale.

For instannce, say if you were a DAP user. Your DAP affiliate link would look like this:

http://digitalaccesspass.com/dap/a/?a=12345

Now let’s say you were also a member of our Techiiies.com web site. Now your affiliate link for Techiiies.com would look like this:

http://techiiies.com/dap/a/?a=98765

You could now essentially “chain” the two affiliate links together, dropping cookies for both DigitalAccessPass.com as well as for Techiiies.com, by doing this:

http://digitalaccesspass.com/dap/a/?a=12345&p=techiiies.com/dap/a/?a=98765

That way, if the visitor who clicks on the above link goes on to buy either DAP or a Techiiies.com membership, you would get credit for that purchase.

DAP lets you create a “Affiliate Promo Materials” page that has ready-made, ready-to-copy-paste banner images, HTML code, and email copy, that includes the affiliate link of the affiliate viewing the page, already readily embedded and customized just for her.

Here’s all you need to know:

Wherever you insert the Affiliate Merge Tag….

%%AFF_LINK%%

…into your blog posts/pages, it will get automatically get replaced by the affiliate’s actual affiliate link, that looks like this…

http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=1234

So, that’s all you really need to know to create a custom, affiliate promo page.

Creating Customized Banners

Normally, your banner code for affiliates would look like this:

<img src=”/path/to/banner/image.jpg”>

That would simply display a banner that is not linked to any link.

Then, here’s how you would link it to any link.

<a href=”http://LinkToSomething.com”><img src=”/path/to/banner/image.jpg”></a>

Now, instead of the link above, you would insert your Affiliate Merge Tag in there, like this:

<a href=”%%AFF_LINK%% “><img src=”/path/to/banner/image.jpg”></a>

That would display the image, as well as link it to the affiliate’s own custom affiliate link. The above code is what you would enter into the promo page in the “Visual” tab, because you want the affiliate to see the actual raw HTML code that she can copy/paste and publish on their web site.

So when the affiliate views your promo page, they would not see an actual image that is linked to their affiliate link, but the raw HTML – just like what you see below – which they can copy and publish on their web site.

<a href=”http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=1234 “><img src=”/path/to/banner/image.jpg”></a>

Obviously, you don’t want them to directly link to the image on your site. So you just tell them that they need to download the image/banner and upload to their web site.

The same can be done for email copy too.

That’s how simple it is.