There are many reasons for wanting to do this.

1) You simply don’t wish to let people know that you have an affiliate program – maybe it is so that you don’t want to confuse the mom-and-pop niche that you are in with crazy words like “Affiliate” and “Commission”

2) You deliberately want to disable certain users from using the affiliate link, and not award them any commissions, even though they know what that link is.

3) You are using a 3rd party affiliate service – like ClickBank – and don’t want to use DAP’s built-in affiliate program.

At this time, you cannot really do (2). There is no way to stop DAP from tracking an affiliate’s referrals and not tracking their earnings. Only work-around right now, is to simply not pay them at all, for whatever reason (you better have a very good reason, if not it could be legal trouble for you).

Here’s how you can do (1) – which essentially works for (3) also.

A) If you are using the default dap/index.php as your members’ home page, then all you have to do is to go to…

Setup > Config > Advanced > “Should Affiliate Section be displayed on User `Home` Page? (If using ClickBank, set this to `N`)”

And set it to “N” (for “No”).

That will essentially “hide” the affiliate section from showing up on the default DAP home page.

B) If you are not using the default dap/index.php, and are putting all of the DAP member content (like User Profile, User Links, Affiliate Details) etc right into your WordPress blog, then just skip the Affiliate Details part, and don’t create a custom page for Affiliates within your blog. If you don’t create the page, then they won’t see it, that’s all.

NOTE: If you don’t want anyone to get any commissions, also make sure that you don’t set up any commissions on the “Affiliates > Set Commissions” page.

So basically, in both (A) and (B), you are essentially “hiding” the affiliate program details, and not really disabling it.

In a future version of DAP, we will have the ability to selectively turn off an individual’s ability to use their affiliate link, so DAP will completely ignore all referrals from the affiliate, and won’t track anything from them.

1) Affiliate was not credited with a sale

There could be many reasons for why the affiliate was not credited to the sale.

1) Buyer didn’t click on any affiliate links before purchasing the product
2) Buyer did click on an affiliate link, but somehow (intentionally – or not) cleared her cookies before buying the product
3) Buyer hasn’t yet logged in to their DAP account after purchase
4) The hourly cron job on your DAP site hasn’t run yet (hourly cron has to have run *after* the buyer has logged in to their account)
5) You have not set up any affiliate commissions for the Product on the “Affiliates > Set Commissions” page

2) Manually credit an Affiliate with a sale

Right now, there’s no way to do this via the DAP Dashboard. We will include this in a future release.

3) Affiliate Program Life Cycle

1. You have already set up a “Per Sale” commission for the Product being purchased.
2. Visitor clicks on affiliate link and affiliate cookie is set on her computer
3. Visitor goes on to buy the product
4. Visitor gets welcome email and logs in to your member’s area: This is when the affiliate is actually credited with the referral. So it is critical that if you’re testing the affiliate program, make sure you log in to the new member’s account. At the time of this login, the only thing that happens is: a) DAP notes down that this buyer was referred by this affiliate. b) If you have set up any “Per Lead” commission, then this lead commission amount is credited to the affiliate’s account. So if the affiliate were to log in to his account at this point, they would just see that they have gotten the “Per Lead” commission credited to their account.If there is no “Per Lead” commission, then nothing is credited to Affiliate account at this point. So if the affiliate were to log in to his account at this point, they would see no referrals yet.
5. At the top of the hour after the buyer has logged in to their member’s area, the DAP Hourly Cron runs. It sees that Buyer X has been referred by Affiliate Y. It also sees that no commissions have yet been paid for the purchase. So it looks up your Affiliate Commission Structure (that you have previously set up on “Affiliates > Set Commissions”), calculates the commission to be paid (“Per Sale Fixed” or “Per Sale Percentage”), and then credits affiliate’s account with that amount.
6. If the affiliate were to log in to his account at this point, they would just see that they have gotten the “Per Sale” commission credited to their account.

DAP uses “Last Cookie” to award commissions.

So if someone clicks on the affiliate link of Jack, and then a few hours (or days) later, clicks on the affiliate link of Jill, and then goes on to purchase your product, then DAP awards the commission to Jill, whose affiliate link was the one clicked most recently.

So, in general, to protect your affiliates, you shouldn’t be promoting your site generally on the web using your own affiliate link (as DAP admin).

That way, you never compete with them for commissions on your own site.

However, using your own affiliate link works great, say, when you’re marketing in specific markets, like say on Adwords. Even though Adwords allows you to set up and track goals, using a special affiliate can help you figure out exactly how much revenue you have earned through this affiliate.

So, for Adwords marketing, you could create a new user called “Adwords Affiliate” and then use this user’s affiliate link as your landing page URL. Of course, you could also customize this affiliate’s link to land on any page of your web site (or any site for that matter) by adding the text “&p=yoursite.com/anypage.html” to the end of your standard affiliate link, like this…

http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=yoursite.com/googleoffer1.html

You probably already know that DAP has an In-built Affiliate Program where all your Members are automatically enrolled as Affiliates.

And as soon as they have an account on your site (free or paid), they get an instant affiliate link that they can immediately start using to promote your membership site.

But what we’ve built here is NOT “Yet Another Affiliate Program” (YAAP – YAWN!)

Here’s our own, very unique twist which completely turns the concept of an Affiliate Program on it’s HEAD – and your Affiliates are going to LOVE YOU for this…

SO YOU ASK: Hey Ravi, so what happens if the buyer uses one computer when clicking on the affiliate link (say, at home), but makes the purchase from another computer (say, at work). Now the affiliate is screwed, right? Hehehe… <insert evil laughter here>

Scenario #1

A) WEBSITE NOT RUNNING DAP

• Buyer arrives at your site through an affiliate link from HOME computer
• Buyer is impressed, joins your list, keeps doing research.
• Days or weeks later, Buyer buys the product from WORK computer (or FRIEND’s computer)
• Buyer gets the product, You get the sale, AFFILIATE GETS SCREWED

Now consider the same scenario on a web site using DAP

B) WEBSITE POWERED BY DAP!

• Buyer arrives at your site through an affiliate link from HOME computer
• Buyer is impressed, joins your email list, keeps doing research.
• Days or weeks later, Buyer buys the product from WORK computer (or FRIEND’s computer)
• Buyer logs in to your membership site and starts browsing around through WORK computer
• Still no Affiliate sale – no worries. Just watch what happens…
• Obviously (or in all probability), Buyer will log into your membership site from HOME computer at SOME point (hey, she can’t download those files at work now, or she can’t always be worried about her bossing catching her red-handed doing OTHER STUFF at work, can she?)
• Doesn’t matter when she again logs in to your site from the original computer (HOME) which has the affiliate cookie – doesn’t matter if it’s after days, weeks or years (yeah, years, really!)
• When Buyer logs in from original computer which has the cookie, DAP correctly awards the sale (better late then never!) to the right Affiliate.
• Buyer gets the product, You get the sale, AFFILIATE GETS HER COMMISSIONS (Yippee!!)

Ok, now how about this REALLY crazy scenario:

Scenario #2: Paying A Per-Lead Commission To Your ClickBank Affiliates

WEBSITE POWERED BY DAP (of course, no one else has probably even thought about this!)

You already know that DAP supports ClickBank purchases, and you can turn off the display of your affiliate section if you are using ClickBank’s own affiliate program, instead of DAP.

But wait – that does not mean that you can’t use the two affiliate programs IN TANDEM to pull of something really crazy – like awarding your ClickBank affiliates with a commission just for sending you a lead – meaning, the lead just signs up for your “free” newsletter – and of course, if they go on to purchase something from your web site (assuming you are selling through ClickBank), then they get the usual CB commissions.

So here’s how it works:

• Every member on your DAP-powered site gets their own affiliate link that looks like:
  http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=1234
• And their CB affiliate link for your product would look like

  http://affnick.merchantnick.hop.clickbank.net

• Now DAP’s affiliate link has the capability of redirecting to any page on your site (or any page on any web site) by adding the destination URL to the affiliate link.
• So, now your affiliate adds their CB affiliate link to the END of their DAP affiliate link, like this:
  http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=http://affnick.merchantnick.hop.clickbank.net
• So when someone clicks on this above link that your affiliate is promoting, then two things happen:
  a) The DAP affiliate cookie is set
  b) The CB cookie is also set
• So within DAP, you can set up just a Per-Lead Affiliate Commission for your Product (which is say, a free newsletter or a free PDF, or whatever)
• So when the referred user signs up at your membership site, they first get paid the Per-Lead Commission
• If they then go on to purchase other products from your web site (which obviously you’re selling through ClickBank, otherwise, this whole section is of no meaning to you), then they get the Per-Sale commission from ClickBank too!

Your head spinning yet?

Of course, then there’s still all the other cool affiliate features in DAP, like…

• Commission Override: Give special treatment to your Top Affiliates and JV partners by giving them higher commissions than the rest of your affiliates.
• Pay affiliates both one-time or monthly recurring commissions for the life of the subscriber.
• Automatic Affiliates: All Users automatically are automatically enrolled as Affiliates
• Pay-Per-Lead and Pay-Per-Sale
• Ready-made Affiliate Links Displayed for Users
• Affiliates can Redirect their Affiliate link to ANY page on your site after setting their affiliate cookie.
• Affiliate-Analytics:
  * Real-time Earnings Reporting
  * Real-time Payment Report
  * Real-time Traffic Stats for both Affiliates and Admin (with referers)
• Paypal Mass-Pay Ready: You get a Paypal Mass-Pay ready, fully formatted affiliate list with all commissions listed.
• Offline Payments: Export Affiliates for payment, pay them using any offline means (eg., checks), and then once the checks have been mailed, you can mark them all as “Paid”.
• Process Refund for Affiliates: When you process a “refund”, DAP will also reverse the affiliate commission. It will not reverse the Pay-per-lead amounts. Only the Pay-per-sale amount is negated.
• Instant Affiliate: Direct 1-click Affiliate Signup

So just thought I would share some details about the cool features of the Affiliate Module that is built right into DigitalAccessPass.com and is available right out of the box, just waiting for you to start signing up an army of affiliates from day 1!

Also check out our documentation to see the other stuff that DAP does.

Using an “Affiliate Signup Page”

1) Create a new product by name “Affiliates”

2) This product obviously will not have any content associated with it (unless you want to give  some content as part of this product, to your affiliates)

3) Use the product’s “Direct Signup HTML”, and publish it on any page of your web site. Let’s call this the “Affiliate Signup Page”

4) Now this form has 2 fields: First name & Email. Anyone can sign up via this form by entering their first name and email id, and DAP will create an account for them, and they will have access to one product, which is “Affiliates”

Manually adding Affiliates from the backend

1) Log in to DAP Dashboard

2) Go to Users > Add

3) In the “Add New User” table, enter the affiliate’s first name, last name (optional), select the product “Affiliates” (which you must have created previously), and add them.

The “Member’s Home Page” (YourSite.com/dap/index.php) has 3 sections.

• Member Links – %%USERLINKS%%
• Affiliate Section – %%AFFDETAILS%%
• Member Profile (username/password) – %%USERPROFILE%%

All three of these can be displayed within your WordPress blog.

Creating a “Member Links” Page within WordPress

Create a WordPress “Page” (not ‘post’) with the text %%USERLINKS%% in the body of the page, and a title of say, Your Links, and save the new page.

If you used the text “Your Links” for the title, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/your-links/

Creating a “Member Profile” Page within WordPress

Create a WordPress “Page” (not ‘post’) with the text %%USERPROFILE%% in the body of the page, and a title of say, User Profile, and save the new page.

If you used the text “User Profile” for the title, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/user-profile/

Creating an “Affiliate” Page within WordPress

Create a WordPress “Page” (not ‘post’) with the text %%AFFDETAILS%% in the body of the page, and a title of say, Affiliate, and save the new page.

If you used the text “Affiliate” for the title, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/affiliate/

That’s it!