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.

DAP has a “Smart Login” feature, where the login process will work slightly differently under different conditions, all designed to make the user-experience for your member more smooth and consistent with general log in standards around the web.

So let’s see the various possible login locations in DAP.

But first, it is important to note that DAP has two main types of logins.

Primary Login

This is where it is considered a “generic” login by your member. For eg., a member came to your web site, and then just generally wants to log in to the member’s area – so they have no “context” – it’s NOT as if they were trying to view a specific page or post, got challenged with a login form, and then logged-in from there. That makes this a “Primary Login“.

Examples of this are…

a) You have a dedicated login page, like http://YourSite.com/login/ – which is what you’ve entered in to “Setup > Config > Login URL“. The body of this page has the DAP merge tag for the login form, which is %%LOGIN_FORM%%

b) Login/Logout Widget on the home page of your web site. This is also considered a primary login, because they just came back to your site, and just wish to log in to their member’s area to see what’s new.

Secondary Login

This is a log in action that HAS “context”. Say, a member landed deep into your site (not the home page, not the dedicated login page) and tried to log in from, say, the widget on the side-bar, or were challenged by the “In Page Error Message” that says something like “Sorry, you must log in before you can view this content” and are presented with a login form right on that very same page. They were trying to read something before they were asked to log in first – which means, they must be returned to the same page they were trying to view BEFORE they were asked to login. So that makes this a “Secondary Login“.

Examples of this are…

a) Login/Logout Widget on any page EXCEPT the home page.

b) Any custom “Error Page”, where you have inserted the DAP merge tag for the login form, %%LOGIN_FORM%%.

c) DAP’s “In-Page Error Message” which says “Sorry, this is private content – you must log in first before you can view this”.

So now that you know what’s a Primary Login and what is a Secondary Login,

Redirection Rules

Based on whether it’s a Primary Login or a Secondary Login, your member will be redirected to a different location.

1) If it is a Primary Login action, then…

a) They’re taken to the “Post-Login URL” if set at a Product-level AND they have access to just one Product.
b) They’re taken to the GLOBAL “Post Login URL” (under Setup > Config) if you have NOT set anything at a Product-level, OR if they have access to more than one Product.

This scenario is the only one where the Post-Login URL is ever used (whether it’s the Product-level or Global-level).

1) If it is a Secondary Login action, then…

They’re always redirected back to the same page they were on (or were trying to access) before they were challenged to log in first to view the content.

Bottom-line:

Primary Login is predictable, and you (the DAP Admin) control where they go right after they login.

Secondary Login depends on “context”, and they’re taken back to whatever page they were before they logged in.

Starting DAP v4.2, each of your members can now get their own unique RSS feed link that they can use with a feed reader (like Google Reader, FeedBlitz, iTunes, etc) to get a custom RSS feed with content that they’re eligible to view.

To give each of your members their own unique RSS Feed URL, just insert the following line of code into the top of the “Member Links” or “My Content” type page, or wherever you want your users to see their personalized RSS feed link…

If your blog is in the root…

http://YourSite.com/feed/?key=%%ACTIVATION_KEY%%

If your blog is in a sub-folder (say “/blog”)…

http://YourSite.com/blog/feed/?key=%%ACTIVATION_KEY%%

The text %%ACTIVATION_KEY%% in the above URL will be replaced with their own custom key, like…

http://YourSite.comcom/feed/?key=123456789

They can then copy that link, enter that into any feed reader, and it will show content specific to their account.

Custom Feed Link Security

Another useful feature we’ve added, is that the custom feed link also does IP count validation. So if they share  the feed link with others, then after “X” unique IP login attempts (where “X” is configurable by you, the DAP Admin, in Setup > Config), their account will automatically get locked out.

There really is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to refund policies.

There are so many factors involved. The main one being, that Visa/Master/Amex/Paypal all give a buyer up to 60 days to ask for a refund, at least with most merchants.

Unless you’ve already negotiated the refund terms with your merchant account provider, and have both specifically agreed that there would be no refunds (like say, if you were selling an expensive item, like a car, or a boat, or a service), or that it’s only going to be a 30-day refund period, then you really have no control over the refund period. You just have to comply with at least the mandatory 60-day refund period required by the credit card companies.

So that brings us to the question:

How much should you set your refund period to be within DAP?

Now remember, it is this Refund Period setting (under Setup > Config > Advanced) that also makes affiliates eligible for payment.

So it really comes down to the question:

What is the waiting period for an affiliate to get paid for a referral?

Our recommendation: 60 days.

That’s because if you end up paying too soon (say like within 15 or 30 days), and then the buyer comes back and asks for a refund, now you’re out-of-pocket for the affiliate commissions that you have already paid on a purchase that you just refunded.

Now remember that when you do the actual refund within DAP, DAP will roll-back any commissions credited towards this purchase. If you have not yet paid your affiliates, then in the next report, it will ignore the refunded purchase, and will not calculate commissions on that purchase.

But if you have already paid your affiliates (like within 15 or 30 days after purchase), then DAP will include the negative commission in the next pay-period’s report. And any future commissions earned by this affiliate will be accordingly adjusted.

However, if the affiliate doesn’t refer any more members, then you have two choices at this point:

1) Ask the affiliate to pay back the over-paid commissions

2) Just swallow the loss, write it up to the cost of doing business, and move on.

Creating 1 Single Login & Password For All Users

This is for when you don’t care about assigning unique usernames and passwords to your users, and would rather given all of your members (or site visitors) a single email id and password to log in to your membership site.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Most important: Go to Setup > Config > Advanced > “Max. # of User Logins From Different IP`s” and set it to a very high number – like 99999999. You’ll need to do this because everyone will be logging in using the same email/password, and you don’t want DAP to lock out the public account (you’re about to create below).
2. Create a “public” user manually, with an email id like, say, “demo@yoursite.com” . DAP will assign a random password to the user (unless of course you have set the “Default” password in Config).
3. Change this password also to something public – like ‘demo’
4. Then if you don’t care about collecting anyone’s email id, then you could publish this info publicly on your web site
5. But if you wish to collect people’s email id’s, and *then* give them this public email/password, then you can still sign them up using the “Direct Signup Form”. And in the welcome email, instead of sending them their own email id and password, send them the public email id and password.

DAP has a feature called “Sneak-Peek” where you can show a part of your blog post for all casual visitors, and then when they click on the “Read more…” link, the protection will kick in for the rest of the post, and DAP will say something to the effect of “Sorry, you must be logged in to access this content. Please login below or click here to get access”.

And that error page will contain both the login form, as well as a link to your sales page. Of course, you can customize this error page to say whatever you want, but that’s another topic altogether.

How this works

WordPress has a feature called the “more” tag. Basically it is a piece of text that you insert into your posts or pages (it actually looks like this: <!–more–>) and then WP will break up your post right at the point where you inserted the more tag, and replace that tag (and everything that follows) with a “Read more…” link. You can also insert the more tag in to your post or page, by clicking on the icon that looks like two rectangles, on the WP Publish page.

Of course, exactly what that “Read more” link will say (it could say, for eg., “Click here to read the rest of this post”) is determined by your WP theme.

So regardless of what it says, when you have a protected post, by default that post will completely disappear from your blog for non-members and those who are logged in, but don’t have access to it yet. And even to Google.

But if you insert the “More” tag in to all of your pages and posts, and in the DAP Dashboard, go t…

“Setup > Config > Advanced > WordPress Sneak Peek: Show snippets of post (upto the `More` break) even for protected posts?”

… and set the above setting to “Y” (for ‘yes’), then on your blog’s summary page (which lists all of your posts), all posts with the more tag (protected and un-protected will anyway show up to the more tag, but when someone clicks on the “Read more’ link, that’s when DAP’s security kicks in and if the user has access to that content, will show her the rest of the post. And if the user is either not logged in, or does not have access to that content (either access is yet to come because of the drip, or content has already expired), then it will show the appropriate error message.

1) “Logged-in URL” on Product page is not taking user to right page after log in.

The Logged-In URL field will work only if user has access to just that one product. If user has access to more than 1-product, DAP cannot decide which Product’s “Logged-In URL” to redirect the user to. So it simply uses the “Global” logged-in URL in “Setup > Config > URL to which User is redirected to, right after log in.

So if you’re testing the “Logged-In URL” field, make sure you create a test user with access to just that one product, and then log in as her and test.

2A) The Lock message says “Sorry, this content is for members only. Click here to get access” but the “Click here” just points to my home page.

OR

2B) “Sales Page URL” on error page not pointing to right URL

The Sales Page URL field of a Product will work only if a piece of content has been added to just that product. If the content has been added to more than one product, then DAP cannot decide which Product’s “Sales Page URL” to show on the “In-Page Error Message” shown to the viewer. So it simply points to the root of the domain. In a future version, this will be configurable, but for now, if you wish to have a custom Sales Page URL shown in the error message, then you can customize the error message HTML and then you’ll be able to enter whatever you want there. Or, instead of using an “In-Page” error page, you could simply redirect the viewer to a custom error page URL.

If you see the original dap/inc/error-notloggedin.php file, you’ll see a line in there that looks like this….

<a href=”%%SALES_PAGE_URL%%“>Click here to get access.</a>

So basically, if the page or post that the person is trying to visit, belongs to just one DAP Product, then the %%SALES_PAGE_URL%% in the above line will actually be replaced with the value of the “Sales Page URL” field from that DAP Product page. But if the same page/post is part of multiple DAP products, then DAP won’t know which Product’s “Sales Page URL” to use – so it will simply point the “Click here” link to the home page.

3) Clicking on a protected Category is not taking user to the correct “Error Page URL”

When you click on a category (instead of a single post), then because the category could contain many posts, each of which could be part of multiple Products. So DAP is unable to choose just 1 single Product from which to pick the “Error Page URL” and redirect the visitor to. So it just shows the error message with the padlock image, which can be customized. Click here for details.

3. The Lock, being generic, says “Sorry, this content is for members only.” but does not specify, as I (will) have several different types of members. It should say something like “Sorry, this content is for %%PRODUCT%% subscribers only.” Can this actually work? I am just guessing.

Response Time: 28 Minutes Wed 23 Mar 2011, 10:13am

» Reply by: Ravi Jayagopal

>>1. Creating a new user account, for someone who is already logged in under a different email address.<< Yeah, that is on our list. Not something that will happen any time soon. Hopefully, we can schedule it for the next release.>>2. Several Emails say various things similar to “New User Signup (3rd Party Notification)” instead of actually telling me what product they signed up for, or even the amount that was made.<< Every one of them should have the product name in the body of the email. If it doesn’t, then something’s not right. So if you find one without a product, then let paste the email here, and we’ll take a look.Other than that, it’s not meant to be a full payment notification email. It’s just meant to be an alert, that’s all. The full payment notification will come from your payment processor. It already does that to a certain extent. If you see the original error-notloggedin.php, you’ll see a line in there that says.. <a href=”%%SALES_PAGE_URL%%”>Click here to get access.</a> If the page or post belongs to just one Product, then the %%SALES_PAGE_URL%% in the above line will actually be replaced with the “Sales Page URL” field from that product. But if the same page/post is part of multiple products, then DAP won’t know which Product’s “Sales Page URL” to use – so it will just point to the home page.

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.

Starting DAP 3.8, DAP has a new feature where you can ask DAP to always generate a pre-chosen, default password of your choice for all new members.

So all new users will be assigned the same default password, which they can of course change as soon as (or any time after) they login.

This is especially helpful for new users, if instead of DAP, you want a third-party service like Aweber to send out the new member’s “Welcome Email” which contains their email and password.

Since DAP is unable to pass the randomly generated password to Aweber, instead, you can setup a default password by going to

Setup > Config > Advanced > “If you want DAP to generate a default password for all new users, enter it here. If not, leave blank”

So if you set this password to say, “changethis“, then DAP will give out the same password to all new users.

Then, in the welcome email you configure at, say, Aweber, you would put the Aweber merge code for email id, and then enter this pre-selected password (because you already know what it is) into your Aweber email, like this:

Hello {!firstname},

Welcome to Example.com. You may log in to your member’s area at:

Email: {!email}
Password: changethis

Thank you,

- Admin from Example.com

And if you ever change the default password in DAP, don’t forget to also change it in your welcome email at Aweber (or 3rd party email service).

Also, don’t use the default password in any subsequent emails, other than the Welcome email (very first email sent to member through Aweber), because the member may have already changed their password by then.

WARNING: You must have also set up DAP/Aweber integration first before you attempt to do this.

You already know that you can create a “My Content” kind of page within WordPress, that will list all products that a user has access to, and then each product will list the content that they currently have access to (content that has already dripped on them).

But this page is a full-summary of all products, all listed on one page.

Instead, if you wished to create product-specific download pages, where you create a separate page for each product, that lists all the content within just that product alone, then that’s where DAP’s “ProductLinks” Widget comes in handy.

Here’s how you set it up.

1. In WordPress admin, go to “Appearance > Widgets” and enable the “DAP ProductLinks” widget by dragging it onto a widgetized section of your theme’s sidebar.
   
2. As soon as you do that, the DAP ProductLinks widget will show up in your blog’s side bar.
   
3. By default, each of the product names – like “Gold Membership” in the above example – will link to whatever URL you put into the “Post-Login URL” for that particular product (DAP Dashboard > Products > Manage). So the next step is to create a separate page for each product, and then enter the permalink for this new page, into the Post-Login URL of that Product within DAP.
4. Create a new page in WordPress – call it, “Gold Membership Content” (for example). In the body of the page, enter the following DAP merge tag:%%PRODUCT_DETAILS_<id>%%
   

   Replace the entire text <id> with the actual Product id from DAP (Products > Manage)

   So, if the product’s id is 6 in DAP, then the merge code becomes:

   %%PRODUCT_DETAILS_6%%

   Save the page. And if you gave the page the title “Gold Membership Content”, then the permalink for this page will be:
   http://YourSite.com/gold-membership-content/

   

5. Take the above permalink and enter it into the product “Gold Membership” in the “Post-Login URL” field. That’s it!
   
6. Do the above for all products and you’re done.

End Result

• For each product that your member buys, the “Your Products” widget will show in the side-bar.
• It will list all of the products that the member has purchased.
• Each of the product names will link to it’s own specific content page
• When member goes to that page, the DAP merge tag you entered for that product will expand into product details and product-specific content links just for that product.