12

Upgrading or Downgrading of Subscriptions

There are two main items that need to be addressed when it comes to a member wanting to Upgrade or Downgrade their Subscription from one membership “level” (a.k.a “Product” in DAP) to another.

1) Modifying the actual recurring payments to reflect the new amount

2) Giving them appropriate access as per the upgrade (or downgrade)

So let’s see how both of these are accomplished.

1) Modifying Recurring Payments

You do need to take some manual action for this. The way to do it is….

• Ask your members to sign up for the new product/level/subscription separately, like it were a new sign up
• Cancel their old subscription manually. When using Paypal standard, this can be done by both you (as the admin) and the member themselves. But with all of the other payment solutions, you (the admin) will have to log in to the payment gateway (Authorize.net or Paypal Website Payments Pro) and manually delete the member’s old subscription). DAP will not automatically remove users old subscription profile in your payment gateway.

2) Giving your member access to new level

Set up automation rules using DAP’s Product Chaining feature, so that if they sign up for one Product (or “level”), they’re automatically removed from another Product (or level).

So if they are currently signed up to your “Gold Membership”, then when they sign up afresh for the “Platinum Membership”, then set up a Product Chaining rule that says, “If member signs up for Platinum Membership, then remove them from Gold Membership”. This is just to make sure that they don’t have access to two products (or “levels”) at the same time.

5

Affiliate Reports

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.

15

Creating Member-specific Content

If you have a coaching program, or have clients for whom you’re doing custom work (like if you were a teacher, CPA, web designer, personal trainer or coach) and wish to publish content that is available to and downloadable by only that specific client/student/customer, then there are THREE ways in which you can do Member-Specific Content in DAP.

1) BEST SOLUTION: Using a combination of a special page for each member PLUS DAP’s “For Your Eyes Only” Shortcode

2) Creating Separate Products for each Member

3) Using DAP’s “For Your Eyes Only” Shortcode

Let’s take a look at each one in detail.

SOLUTION #1: BEST OPTION: Special page for each member PLUS DAP’s “For Your Eyes Only” Shortcode

This is partly manual, partly automated, but is the absolute best solution for multiple reasons, as explained below.

1) For each new member, you would create a separate page. So, for Joe Customer, you would create a new page in WP – http://YourSite.com/joe-customer/

This page would be created after someone has become a member, of course. But creating a WP page for every member will probably take you about what, 30 seconds? So it’s not going to be a big deal (unless you wish to make it one 😉

2) Then, assuming Joe Customer’s “userid” in DAP is 144 (you can find this out on the Users > Manage page). So within the above new page, you would add the following shortcode…

[DAP userId=”144″]protected content[/DAP]

(See DAP’s “Member-Specific Content” Shortcodes )

3) You can start adding any amount of private content between the shortcode start and end tags (where you see protected content above).

4) You can use a simple, free plugin like Exclude Pages to make sure the customer’s page http://YourSite.com/joe-customer/ does not show up in any of your menu’s. Even if it did, it’s not like anyone else can see the contents of the page – only Joe Customer – after he’s logged in to DAP – can see the contents of the page. So it’s secure from everyone else.

Solution #2: Separate Products for each Member

Here, you would create separate products, one per member – and only give that member access to that product. The advantage here, is that you can protect the entire page (not just the content section) and make it available just to that one client, so you can be a lot more creative with this page, use special templates, add sidebar widgets that show content just for that client, use the commenting system to communicate back and forth with the client.

So if you had a client named John Customer, then you would create a DAP Product by name “John Customer”, then take John’s email id and give John access to his product.

And within this DAP Product, you would’ve protected files, pages and posts that only John should get access to. So since only John has access to the product, only he can get access to the content protected as part of this product.

Obviously, it takes a few minutes of additional setup per customer to create a DAP Product specifically for him, but then the few extra minutes of creating a DAP Product would be nothing compared to the few hours (or tens of hours) that you’re actually going to be taking to create the actual custom content for John. So it’s a very small overhead compared to the whole process, where you are actually creating custom content for each member.

Solution #3: No special pages, just DAP’s “Member-Specific Content” Shortcode

If you wish to automated this a bit more than Option #2, then one way is to implement this is using DAP’s “Member-Specific Content” Shortcodes, which look like this:

Using the “userId” parameter in the DAP shortcode, you can now protect a piece of content so that only John Customer (who has the user id “144” in your membership site) user can see it.

[DAP userId=”144″]protected content[/DAP]

So on a single page, you may publish a number of these shortcodes, with content meant only for specific members protected within those shortcodes.

And doesn’t matter which one of your members visits the above page, they will all only see content intended only for them, and will be unable to see content intended for others.

So those are the three ways in which you can create Member-Specific Content.

Member-specific Chat Room

Using our WPChatR Chatroom plugin for WordPress, you can also create a separate page per user, then put a chat room on that page specific to that user, so you can have unlimited back-and-forth real-time or off-line chats with one specific member.

0

Login Redirect

Admin users will always be redirected to the dap admin dashboard upon login.

Regular users (non-admin) will be redirected either to the ‘product-level logged-in‘ url or the Global logged-in URL (set in dap setup->config->Post-Login URL ).

If the user has access to 1 product, the user will be redirected to the ‘product-level’ logged-in url. This is set in the DAP products page as shown below:

If the user has access to multiple products OR if the product-level logged-in url is not set, the user will be redirected to global logged-in url set in DAP setup- > config as shown below:

0

Test Email Delivery Issues on Your Host

If thank-you email or double-opt-in email or forgot password email is NOT getting delivered even after you configure it in dap, it likely has something to do with your host settings and does not have anything to do with DAP.

NOTE: WordPress replaces double quotes with backticks (“). Pls make sure to replace all backticks (“) below with double quote otherwise the php code will break.

To test:

Upload the following php code to a file called testmail.php file to the root of your site.

<?php

$to = “yourname@yourdomain.com”; // put in your email address here to send an email to yourself

$subject = “Test mail”;

$message = “Hello! This is a test email message.”;

$from = “you@yourdomain.com”; // SET this to point to a valid sender email address

$headers = “From:” . $from;

mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);

echo “Mail Sent.”;

?>

NOTE:

Update the “from tag” above to point to a valid email address.
Then run the following script on your browser and see if it goes through.

http://yoursite.com/testmail.php (replace yoursite.com with the name of your site).

4

Integrate Worldpay

Integration between DAP and Worldpay is IPN (instant payment notification) based and pretty straightforward.

a) Login to your Worldpay account, go to your Production/Test Installation, set the Payment Response URL to point to the DAP script on your site — http://YOURSITE.COM/dap/dap-worldpay.php (replace YOURSITE.COM with the name of your site)

b) Make sure the ‘Description‘ in Worldpay eXactly matches Product Name in DAP.

That’s it.

 

2

Troubleshooting CB issues

1) If you have integrated DAP and CB using INS and receive this error message or email : [DAP] http://yoursite.com: dap-clickbank.php: Check your ClickBank secret key in DAP Config

Pls do this to resolve this error:

– Pls make sure the Secret Key is the same in both Clickbank and in DAP config area. It should be all uppercase and do not use any special characters.

– Pls set the CB INS to version 1.0. Do NOT use version 2.0.

– Make sure the product name in dap and the Product Titles in Clickbank exactly match.

2)  If you receive this error message  :  DAP Clickbank INS Error (Rejected): INS Product Name =  ‘your product name’ does not match any DAP Product Name. But REJECTING MISMATCH it because of your Config settings (Product Mismatch)

You can ignore this error if it’s not a dap product. It does not affect the CB affiliate commissions.

If you set the INS URL in CB to point to DAP, then all purchase notifications will get sent to dap.

DAP will only process the ones that are relevant to it and throw away the rest. But before it throws away unrelated purchases for non-dap products, it sends out this email to the admin as FYI that can be ignored.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

0

Troubleshooting Merge Tag Issues

If you put in the DAP merge tags like %%LOGIN_FORM%%, %%USERLINKS%%, %%USERPROFILE%% in a WordPress page but if it does not render correctly, pls do this:

1) Make sure DAP Live Links plugin is active
(check WP admin => Plugins).

2) If it is active, then create a new WP Page with ONLY this tag – %%LOGIN_FORM%%

3) Now open the WP page and see if you still see it as %%LOGIN_FORM%% or if it renders correctly.

4) If you still see it as %%LOGIN_FORM%%, then go back to WP Admin -> Plugins and temporarily de-activate all Plugins EXCEPT DAP Live Link to check if there is a plugin conflict.

5) Go back and open the WP page you created in step 3 above and see if it renders correctly

6) If it still does not work, send us your FTP info, dap and WordPress admin panel url, id/password info for troubleshooting. If it works, then re-activate Plugins one-at-a-time to see which one caused conflict.

2

Merging User Accounts

User ID 111 has been created with email id ABC123@somewhere.com

Same user buys a different product using a completely new (Paypal) email id. and DAP creates User ID 999 with PayPal email XYZ789@anothersite.com

User now has 2 accounts and wants only ABC123@somewhere.com (user ID 111) to be active.

So here’s what you should do:

1. Place XYZ789@anothersite.com in the PayPal email field of User ID 111 and save.
2. Give User ID 111 access to all products that User ID 999 currently has active, with matching start and end dates.
3. Delete User ID 999 fully from the system.

If User ID 111 purchases additional products through Paypal, and her primary Paypal email id is still XYZ789@anothersite.com, then that Paypal email id will be recognized by DAP, and all purchased products will be activated under User ID 111 and no additional User IDs will be created.

However, if User ID 111 has changed their primary Paypal email id to be something else like XYZ123@yetanother.com, then the next time they make a purchase, DAP will not know it’s the same person, and will end up creating a completely new user id for the buyer. Which means, you will have to do the merge again, and replace the old Paypal email id in DAP with the new Paypal email id of the buyer.

5

Optimizing Your WordPress Blog For Speed

If you want to speed up your web site, you must address the core issue, which is — your web site is getting more traffic than your web server (web hosting account) can handle.

So here are a few ways in which you can speed up your web site:

• The easiest thing you can do is to revisit all of your plugins that you have enabled and see if you still need all of them. Remember that every single additional plugin running on your site, adds some overhead to (basically, “slows down”) your web site or blog. So use only as few plugins as you absolutely must. With so many cool plugins freely available for WordPress, it is very easy to get carried away, and install tens of plugins, most of them adding very little value, but sometimes causing the most overhead in terms of server resources. So keep only a bare minimum of other plugins (some social plugins are a real pain – making calls to third-party web sites to get their information from).
• Using a “cache” plugin for speeding up your site is like putting band-aid on a gaping wound. It’s only a temporary fix, and not a real long-term solution, but every bit helps. We recommend WP Super Cache, and be sure to whitelist all of your member pages from getting cached.
• Make sure you are always using the latest version of WordPress, or at worst, one version behind the very latest and greatest (you definitely want to be sure first that there are no conflicts with other critical plugins that you’re using on your site).
• Make sure you update all of the plugins and themes you’re using to their individual latest versions (get rid of every single plugin and theme that you’re not using).
• If you are hosting on a shared (a.k.a “cheap”) web host paying just a few dollars a month for hosting, then your web site is basically competing for server resources (like memory and bandwidth and database access) with possibly tens (or even hundreds) of other web sites on that same server (many may not belong to you, but to others with whom you are sharing the server – and hence the name “shared hosting”). Search for the keywords “digg effect” or “slashdot effect” on Google, and you’ll see how many WordPress sites crash when a link to the site appears among the top results in popular social sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com or Slashdot.com.If your traffic levels have outgrown your server, then the best thing you can do is to upgrade to a bigger server, or get a Virtual Private Server, or even get a dedicated host, depending on your budget. See our recommended web hosts list.