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

1) Buyer didn’t really click on any affiliate links
2) Buyer did click on an affiliate link, but somehow (intentionally or not) cleared their 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)

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.

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

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.

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.

• 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!