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.

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.

When you use the merge tag %%LOGIN_FORM%% in a WordPress page, the tag is replaced by a login form that your member can use to log in to your membership site.

If you wish to customize the look & feel or text of the form, then rename the file…

wp-content/plugins/DAP-WP-LiveLinks/DAP-WP-LoginForm.html

To…

wp-content/plugins/DAP-WP-LiveLinks/customDAP-WP-LoginForm.html

Basically you are adding the text “custom” to the beginning of the file name, that’s it.

And this new file will also reside in the same directory.

Once you have this new file in the directory, DAP will ignore the old, default file, and will only use your new custom version.