Entries Tagged 'Affiliates' ↓

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.

The single biggest reason why the affiliate program may not be working for you when you’re initially setting it up and testing it, is because of incorrect testing parameters.

The most common ones being:

• A good clean test was not carried out, allowing the proper cookies to be set, or
• You were already logged in as DAP admin, and did not log in correct as your new buyer
• You were using the same browser to log in as DAP admin, DAP user, new buyer, etc, thus causing a problem for DAP to set and track the affiliate cookies.

A Clean Affiliate Test

1. Make sure you have set up affiliate commissions for the Product on the “Affiliates > Commissions” page
2. Log out of DAP as admin, clear your browser cookies, and restart your browser
3. Click on an affiliate link (that you have previously sent yourself via email)
4. When you land at your web site, now make a real purchase
5. If you haven’t set up Login Xpress (where buyers are automatically logged in to member’s area), then you MUST log into the members’ area using the user id that you used to make the purchase (you DO NOT need to log in separately if Login Xpress is setup and you get auto-logged in upon purchase)
6. Now in a separate browser window, log in as DAP Admin, go to “Users > Manage” page to make user the user account is created, and that there is actually a transaction id listed under the Trans ID column of the user’s row.
7. There should be one. Click on that transaction id, it will bring you to the transaction details page
8. Look at the status of the transaction – it should say SUCCESS at this point.
9. Now wait for the top of the hour, for the DAP hourly cron job to run. When the cron finishes running, refresh the transaction details page. The status of the transaction should have changed to Processed Affiliations Successfully.
10. Now when you log in as the affiliate, you will find the commissions credited for this buyer’s purchase.

Here are some more troubleshooting steps:

1A) Affiliate was not credited with a sale

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

a) Buyer didn’t click on any affiliate links before purchasing the product
b) Buyer did click on an affiliate link, but somehow (intentionally – or not) cleared her cookies before buying the product
c) If you haven’t set up Login Xpress, then buyer needs to log in to your membership site – which they probably haven’t done yet (if this is the case, see if DAP supports Login Xpress for your payment processor)
d) 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)
e) You have not set up any affiliate commissions for the Product on the “Affiliates > Set Commissions” page

1B) Affiliate was credited with the “Lead”, but not the “Sale” (no commissions awarded)

Short answer: You’re not using “Login Xpress”. And you probably forgot to initially set up the affiliate commission for the Product in question, under “Affiliates > Commissions“, and only set up the commission record 7 days (or more) after the actual sale happened (the sale for which your affiliate got the “Lead”, but not the “Sale” (and in effect, no commissions). We call this the “7 Day Commission Cutoff Period”. So affiliate will not be awarded the commission. You just have to pay them offline.

Long answer: DAP has two ways of awarding commissions:

a) Using Login-Xpress, where affiliates are attached to buyers instantly after purchase, and when the cron job runs at the top of the next hour, the affiliate commissions are credited to the affiliate’s account.

b) In situations where Login-Xpress is not possible (due to restrictions with the specific payment processor), the affiliate is attached to the buyer only when the buyer actually logs in to your membership site. Believe it or not, not everyone logs in the same day (sometimes not even for a few days after) they’ve purchased your product. So it’s possible that the affiliate/buyer connection is not made by DAP until a couple of days later.

Now consider these scenarios…

Case X: Buyer clicked on affiliate link at work. They purchased the product at work. You don’t have Login-Xpress setup. So only way for affiliate/buyer connection to be made, is when your member logs in to your site for the first time. So they went home that evening, logged in for the first time from home, but there’s no affiliate cookie at home. Normally your affiliate is screwed. But DAP goes the extra mile to be fair to affiliates. If your buyer logs in to your membership site even a couple of days later from work, since the cookie is still on their work computer, the affiliate and buyer are now connected, and affiliate gets credit for the sale.

Case Y: Buyer never clicked on any affiliate link. They bought your product. You did not have Login-Xpress setup. So only way for affiliate/buyer connection to be made, is when your member logs in to your site for the first time. So since they never clicked on any affiliate link, there’s no affiliate cookie. They buy your product, log in to your site, and their account has no affiliate attached to it. Then a couple of days later, they’re surfing the web, and happen to read an article from one of your affiliates, and intentionally or not, click on that affiliate’s link. Now that affiliate’s cookie is stored on their computer. The next time they login, DAP thinks “Ah, this is the same as Case X (above): No affiliate attached already, but now finding affiliate cookie – same as the buy at work/login at home example. So DAP will go ahead and give that affiliate credit for the sale, even though the referral was not made prior to purchase. So to avoid awarding affiliates incorrectly (after the sale), DAP is deliberately programmed to look for transactions only for the last 7 days, every time the DAP hourly cron job runs.

2) 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. a) If you HAVE setup Login Xpress, then member is logged right into the members’ area.
   b) If your payment processor does not support (or you HAVE NOT setup) Login Xpress, then buyer 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.
5. So regardless of whether they’re auto-logged in right after purchase, or whether they log in a few minutes after the purchase after they’ve received their log in information via email, the login action takes place at this point.
6. At the time of this login, the only thing that happens is:
   a) DAP records in the database that this buyer was referred by the affiliate set in the affiliate cookie.
   b) If you have set up any “Per Lead” commission, then this lead commission amount is instantly credited to the affiliate’s account. So if the affiliate were to log in to his account exactly at this second, 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 the affiliate would see no “Sale” commissions yet.
7. At the top of the hour after the buyer has logged in to their member’s area, the DAP Hourly Cron (dap-cron.php) runs. It sees that Buyer X has been referred by Affiliate Y. It also sees that no “Sale” commissions have yet been credited to the affiliate for the purchase. It then looks up the Affiliate Commissions that you have previously set up at “Affiliates > Set Commissions”, calculates the commission to be credited (“Per Sale Fixed” or “Per Sale Percentage”), and then credits affiliate’s account with that amount.
8. 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.

3) Affiliate is unable to access the Affiliate-Info page.

So you created an “Affiliate” product, created a free sign-up form, and an affiliate signed up to this product, and is trying to log in and access the page, but is unable to, and is getting the “Sorry, you don’t have access to this product” error.

There could be many reasons for that (main one is #1 below):

a) Anyone who signs up through the “Direct Signup HTML Form” is added as a “Free” user. Which means, they can only access content that has been marked as free. So if you have created an “Affiliate” Product, and have added the affiliate-info page to that product, make sure that page is accessible by free users too, by clicking on the “edit” link next to the page, and on the resulting popup, set “Accessible to
Free users too?” to “Y”.

b) You have not even made the affiliate-info page protected under the “Affiliate” product

4) Double Credit of Affiliate Commissions for the same purchase

This is not really a double-credit for the same purchase, even though it appears to be so.

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

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

That’s usually how you end up crediting double commissions to the affiliate who referred the user, because all affiliate commissions are calculated from sales, and if you have two separate transactions for the same purchase, then the affiliate will get credited twice for the same referral.

So if you see two credits for the affiliate, you must first note that it is not for the same transaction, but for different transactions (note the different Trans Id‘s) on the Affiliates > Reports page.

So be careful when you’re entering Manual transactions. Those are meant only for when there is no way to automate the recording of a purchase (because they paid offline) 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 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

DAP offers you a built-in Affiliate Program for your web site, where all your Members can automatically and instantly be enrolled as Affiliates.

And here are a few, rarely implemented features in DAP that you won’t find in too many other affiliate providers:

1) Instant Affiliates

This means that as soon as a buyer purchases any product, or even signs up for a free product, they can get an instant affiliate link that they can immediately start using to promote your membership site.

In fact, you can even send them their own unique affiliate link right in their welcome email itself, the same email where you send them their login info! So even before they’ve logged in to your site to download or view the content that they’ve just purchased, they’re already and affiliate and can start promoting your site to others, and earn back their investment even before they’ve reached your refund period.

2) Affiliate Link Redirection

Let’s say you were an Affiliate of Amazon.com. Now imagine if Amazon gave you just one, static affiliate link to promote ALL of their products across their ENTIRE web site. That is, one standard affiliate link to promote millions of products, and anyone who clicked on that standard link would always land at Amazon’s home page, no matter what – and that there was no way to direct affiliate traffic directly to any of the actual product pages.

Imagine if you saw a link on our blog that read “Click here to check out the amazing Bamboo Fun tablet” and the link, instead of taking you directly to the product page of the Bamboo fun, took you to Amazon’s home page? How incredibly annoying would that be for the visitor to always be taken to Amazon’s home page no matter what product someone were recommending? Think Amazon would be the e-commerce juggernaut it is today without that implementing that simple feature?

But Amazon lets you link directly to the product pages of the product you are referring to (or recommending, or promoting).

Like….

“Check out the amazing Bamboo Fun tablet” (links directly to product page)

“Check out my best-selling book ‘No Business Like E-Business’ on Amazon” (links directly to the book page)

We are amazed that so many affiliate software providers do not offer this simple, basic feature. And that is the ability to set the affiliate cookie, and then redirect the referred visitor to any page on any web site the affiliate wants the visitor to land on.

So when you use DAP, your affiliates are not forced to always send traffic to your home page. They can redirect the visitor (who just clicked on their affiliate link) to any part of your web site. In fact, they can redirect the visitor to any web page on any web site anywhere online! So they could be sending traffic to one of your free videos, one of your blog posts, or even to one of your articles published on someone else’s web site!

3) Multi-Tier Affiliate Program

DAP allows you to offer multiple tiers of commissions, not just one. So you can create an incredible revenue stream for your affiliates, where they get paid on the sales generated by their 1st level referrals. Which means more incentive for them to join and promote your affiliate program!

4) Paying A Per-Lead Commission To Your ClickBank Affiliates

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!

So that sums up some of the best features that are part of DAP.

Of course, 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.
• Pay-Per-Lead and Pay-Per-Sale
• Ready-made Affiliate Links Displayed for Users
• Ready-made Affiliate Toolbox for your affiliates
• 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.

So these are the features available to right out-of-the-box, just waiting for you to start signing up an army of affiliates from day 1!

For more information about the Affiliate Module, check out our documentation page at http://DigitalAccessPass.com/documentation/ and see the

Now please note that every member is automatically enrolled as an affiliate. Which means, that the moment they become a member, they are also an affiliate by default. So your members are all automatic affiliates, and if you wish to create a page for them where they can get their own unique affiliate link and affiliate stats, then you can create an “Affiliate Info” page as explained here.

However, there may be times when you wish to directly sign up affiliates – those who may not be or become actual members, or those who you do not expect to buy anything just to become an affiliate (like your JV partners or super-affiliates), or simply those whose help you want in promoting your site, but don’t wish to give them any content access.

In those cases, here’s how you can create a direct affiliate sign-up form for JV partners and super-affiliates.

Using an “Affiliate Signup Page”

1) Create a new DAP Product called “Affiliates”

2) This product obviously will not have any content associated with it (unless you do wish to give away some content to your affiliates, as part of having access to this Product)

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”

It’s then up to you whether you want to publicly link to this “Affiliate Signup Page” from your home page (using text that says “Affiliates, Click here to sign-up”). Or if you don’t wish to allow anyone and everyone to be able to sign up as an affiliate – and subsequently signing up through their own affiliate link (of course, they’ll use someone else’s name during the purchase – then don’t make this page public. And email the link only to your future partners or affiliates.

Manually adding Affiliates from the backend

1) Log in to DAP Admin 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 to that product.

Creating Your “Member’s Area”

DAP has 4 main Member-facing pages (the rest of your content is all standard WordPress pages and posts and categories, along with your media – like Videos, PDF reports, etc.):

• Login page: This is where your members (as well as you, the DAP Admin) would log in at. This can be a stand-alone login page, or a login form on the sidebar (that turns in to a logout button once they log in)
  
• My Content: This section shows all the products that the member has purchased or signed up for. This is the page that shows the links newly appearing as and when they are dripped on the member.
• My Profile: This shows all of the user profile fields – like first name, last name, email, password, address, etc. They can change all of their contact information on this page.
• Affiliate Info: This shows members their own personalized affiliate link, their link-referral stats, commissions earned, commissions paid, etc. If you want to make this page even more useful, you can add banners and emails and promo copy that the affiliate can simply copy/paste and send to their list.

So basically, only 4 “member” pages as far as DAP is concerned.

Now let’s see how you can put all of these 4 components, right with your WordPress blog.

• “Login” page – use the merge tag %%LOGIN_FORM%%
• “My Content” section – use the merge tag %%USERLINKS%%
• “My Profile” (username/password) – merge tag %%USERPROFILE%%
• “Affiliate Info” Section – merge tag %%AFFDETAILS%%

Creating a Login Page within WordPress

Now DAP already provides you with a built-in, out-of-the-box login form, at YourSite.com/dap/login.php . But if you want to put this form “within” your WordPress blog, so as to give your login form the same Look & Feel as the rest of your blog, then do this…

1) Create a WordPress Page (not “Post”) with the text %%LOGIN_FORM%% in the body of the page, and a title of say, Login, and save the new page. If you used the text “Login” for the title, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/login

2) This page now shows up as “Login” along with the rest of your “pages” on your blog.

3) Go to DAP Admin > Setup > Config . Scroll down to the field Login URL

In the text box, enter the full link to your login page from Step 1:
http://YourSite.com/blog/login

Or if your blog is in the root, then…

http://YourSite.com/login

That’s it! When someone clicks on the “Login” link that now shows in your “Pages” menu, they will now see a nicely formatted login form.

Related: Where is the Logout Link?

Creating The Member’s Area

• “My Content” section – use the merge tag %%USERLINKS%%
• “My Profile” (username/password) – merge tag %%USERPROFILE%%
• “Affiliate Info” Section – merge tag %%AFFDETAILS%%

You can either put them all on one WordPress page – eg., create a single page called “My Account” and in the body of that page, put all 3 merge tags one after the other).

Or you can split them up and create 3 separate pages to display these sections, like shown in the image below.

Creating a “Member Content” Page within WordPress

This is the page that shows all of a member’s content details – like what products the user has purchased, what are the access start and end dates for that purchase, and all of the content within each product – all separately organized.

To create such a page, simply create a WordPress “Page” (not ‘post’) with the title “My Content“  (for example) and within the body of the page, enter the text %%USERLINKS%% and save the new page. Now if you visit the page, and you are logged in, it will show you something similar to the image below.

And if you gave this page the title of “My Content”, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/my-content/

Creating a “Member Profile” Page within WordPress

This is the section that shows the user’s profile information, where they can change their name, email id, address and other details.

For this, create a WordPress Page (not ‘post’) with the text %%USERPROFILE%% in the body of the page, and a title of say, User Profile (or) My 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

This is the page that shows your users their affiliate link (which is instantly created for them upon purchasing any product on your site), link clicks, referrer details, earnings and payments.

For this, 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 “Affiliates” for the title, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/affiliates/

That’s it!

Now if you want to make the affiliate page more powerful by creating a “ready-made affiliate toolbox” for your affiliates, then see this: Creating an Affiliate Toolbox