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2
Affiliate: DAP vs ClickBank
We are frequently asked, why should someone use DAP’s built-in affiliate program, rather than using ClickBank’s affiliate program.
Here’s the difference in a nutshell.
Advantage: DAP
When you use DAP’s built-in affiliate module, …
- You don’t have to send your members over to Clickbank to sign up separately for an affiliate account
- Every member (or buyer) becomes (at your option, of course) an “automatic” and “instant” affiliate the second they purchase any product or membership level
- You can do Pay-Per-Lead (can’t do that with CB)
- You can choose your commission level to whatever you want (CB forces minimum & maximum commission percentages)
- You control who signs up for your Affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
- You can kick spammers and abusers out of your affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
- If you use CB, then every person who arrives at your web site through another CB affiliate’s link, can easily screw the original affiliate, and end up purchasing your product through their own CB affiliate link. But your affiliates can’t screw other affiliates when you use DAP. So DAP helps you protect your affiliates’ commissions. Which means, your affiliates will promote you more happily and aggressively, because they know their commissions are safe.
- CB is a bad choice of affiliate program in the IM and web-savvy niches, because everyone knows about CB, and everyone knows how to replace your affiliate nickname with theirs, and steal your affiliate’s commissions from right under your nose. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
- If you use CB, if an affiliate didn’t get credited for a sale you know that they brought in (for whatever reason), there’s no way to manually credit that affiliate for the purchase. Using DAP, you can do this (starting v3.9)
- You cannot credit or pay affiliates for offline payments with CB. You can do that with DAP (starting v3.9).
Advantage: ClickBank
Of course, you should also be aware of the flip side.
- CB has a large built-in community of affiliates that you can take advantage of to promote your product (of course, actually finding them and getting them excited enough to promote you is another thing altogether)
- CB takes care of handling commission payments and refunds and charge-backs – so it is less work for you as the admin.
- When you use a 3rd party like CB, some affiliates may prefer that, especially if they don’t know you, don’t trust you to make the payments on time, or your site is new (or not popular yet).
Related Reading: Leveraging Multiple Affiliate Networks
Your Host Does Not Support Cron Jobs
Question: You ask what to do if your host does not support cron jobs?
Short answer: You may want to switch your hosting company.
The basic idea of a cron jobs is that it allows you to run scheduled tasks, that run automatically, frequently, silently, in the background, without requiring manual intervention.
DAP uses cron jobs to do things like…
- Send out autoresponder emails
- Send out broadcast emails
- Manage your outgoing queue of emails so that you can stay within your cheap web host’s strict hourly email sending limits
- Process and manage affiliate data & commissions , and
- Do some clean up jobs
Any membership plugin that offers email broadcasts, autoresponders and other bulk tasks, will likely ask you to set up cron jobs for sending out emails. You couldn’t possibly send out an email blast to even 500 members in real time as your browser will timeout.
DAP requires you to set up a cron job to do all of the tasks above.
If yours doesn’t, seriously you have only 2 choices…
- Stick to your host but lose the ability to use powerful scripts like DAP.
- Or do the smart thing and move to a better host. There are plenty of good ones out there, and there are a few we recommend highly, and they’re very inexpensive.
14
Instant Affiliate Payments
There are some scripts out there that will allow you to “pay affiliates instantly”.
What this essentially means, is that the “seller email” in your Paypal button, is actually replaced with your affiliate’s Paypal email id. Which means the payment from your buyer is going straight into your affiliate’s Paypal account, not yours.
This means that when your buyer looks at her Paypal account, it does not say payment made to you “John Seller” (you), but to “Joe Affiliate” (your affiliate).
This is a poor business practice on so many levels.
1) Customer bought a product from you. Why is her Paypal account showing that she just made a payment of $97 to “Joe Affiliate”? Your customer is thinking, “Wait a minute… Who the heck is Joe Affiliate? I did not buy anything from any Joe Affiliate. Why is my Paypal account showing that I paid him money? HELP!… Fraud… Paypal Dispute… Scammer… I want a REFUND!”. Well, that’s what we would think too if we bought something from one merchant, and saw the payment going to someone else.
2) What happens when your customer wants a refund? Now you’re going to have to ask Joe Affiliate to return the payment, because you never got it – he did. What if Joe Affiliate doesn’t respond on time? What if he doesn’t return the money on time? What if he doesn’t want to return it at all? Will you hold up your customer’s refund, or are you going to keep paying out of your pocket and “hope” that Joe Affiliate returns your payment to you this time, and not to the buyer, because you have already send the buyer their money back?
So yes, this is just bad for business. Not to forget, looks extremely unprofessional on your part too.
The only way to properly handle instant payments, is by using Paypal’s Adaptive Payments technology, which allows you to do something called “Chained Payments”. And using Chained Payments, your customer always pays YOU first. And you can set up a chain, so that as soon as their payment hits your Paypal account, Paypal in turn will instantly send a money from YOUR account to your AFFILIATE’s account. So Customer pays you, you pay the affiliate. And that’s how it should be.
Anything else will only get you in trouble with Paypal, maybe even get your account banned, piss your customers off, dilute your brand, your reputation may get trashed, and just about everything that is not good for your business could happen.
Now DAP does allow you to instantly ‘credit’ your affiliate’s account with the payment due, but you still have to push a couple of buttons before the affiliate can actually get paid.
And that’s how it’s going to be until we develop support for Paypal Adaptive Payments (which has its own complications, by the way).
What is your take on this? Feel free to leave your comments below.
2
Affiliate Link Chaining
Updated: 09/03/2013
This will be very useful to you if you own multiple DAP-Powered membership sites, and you want your affiliates to set affiliate cookies for multiple DAP sites all at once.
DAP allows your affiliates to set the cookie, and then redirect the visitor to any web site URL they want. That second link could be yet another affiliate link from another DAP site, or any affiliate link for that matter.
This allows your affiliates the ability to drop their affiliate cookie on the visitor’s computer for multiple DAP sites. So if they visitor goes on to buy from any of the “network” sites (all powered by DAP), they will get the credit for the sale.
This article is about setting 2 separate DAP affiliate cookies (from two separate membership sites) with one single user-click.
A Tale Of Two Cookies 🙂
Let’s say you have DAP running on two separate web sites. SiteA.com and SiteB.com
You have someone who is an affiliate on both sites. They have user id 1111 on SiteA.com, and user id 2222 on SiteB.com
So here’s how they can create a link that drops two separate DAP affiliate cookies from two different domains on the visitor’s computer, so the affiliate can get credit for any sales happening on either web site.
- Your affiliate’s link for SiteA.com is http://SiteA.com/dap/a/?a=1111
- Now redirect that to a intermediate auto-redirecting page on any of those two sites (doesn’t matter. So let’s pick SiteA.com. And this redirect page – let’s call it redirect.html – is a simple HTML page with a meta-refresh tag as shown below:<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0;URL=http://SiteB.com/dap/a/?a=2222“>
</head>
</html> - If you see the URL value in the above text, you’ll see that the above page is basically doing a simple and instant redirect to the 2nd affiliate link – which is http://SiteB.com/dap/a/?a=2222
- So the main affiliate link becomes http://SiteA.com/dap/a/?a=1111&p=www.SiteA.com/redirect.html
That’s it!
So basically, here’s what’s happening:
The first affiliate link (with extra redirection at the end)…
http://SiteA.com/dap/a/?a=1111&p=www.SiteA.com/redirect.html
Redirects to…
www.SiteA.com/redirect.html
And redirect.html in turn redirects the visitor to…
http://SiteB.com/dap/a/?a=2222
That ends the chain. But if you want to take it further, keep reading.
If you want the final landing page to be say SiteC.com/some-page/ then your HTML code for redirect.html becomes…
<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0;URL=http://SiteB.com/dap/a/?a=2222&p=www.SiteC.com/some-page/“>
</head>
</html>
Hope this helps.
2
WordPress versus HTML
Last updated: Dec 6, 2014
[NOTE: Read this only if you have a Non-WordPress, plain HTML web site that you wish to protect using DAP]Ok, so you’re not using (or thinking of not using) WordPress to power your web site. For what it’s worth, you are way better off using WordPress, but if you can’t switch for whatever reason, then keep reading.
DAP is deeply integrated with WordPress, and has a lot of very powerful features that work with WordPress like a dream. DAP is truly “Made For WordPress”.
While you’re really missing out on a *lot* of really cool things that you can do with DAP and WordPress, it’s fine as far as DAP is concerned that you wish to use DAP with a non-WordPress plain HTML web sites – because DAP can protect plain HTML web sites too.
But you also need to understand that because you’re not using WordPress, that makes “customizing” your DAP-powered site a bit more difficult, not because of a DAP shortcoming, but just because of the sheer fact that you have to hand-code a lot of things when it comes to a regular non-WordPress, HTML-based site.
So if you’re going to go down this route, there are a few things to consider:
- There are some DAP features which are WordPress-only, that won’t work on a plain HTML web site. For eg., Sneak-Peek, Short Codes for Partial Content Protection, Disabling Comments for non-members, ability to use free WordPress forum plugins, creating customizable member’s areas etc.
- You won’t be able to use our DAP Shopping Cart Plugin because it’s a WordPress plugin.
- You won’t be able to use any of our cool WickedCoolPlugins.com plugins.
- You won’t be able to use our built-in “Login/Logout Widget“, which shows the login form on the sidebar if users are not logged in, and automatically turns into a “Logout” button once they log in to your membership site.
- You won’t be able to “power customize” or “power tweak” every aspect of your membership area. For example, you must use the out-of-the-box log in page that comes with DAP – you cannot customize it much other than choosing a header and footer, unless you know how to work with a bit of PHP & HTML.
- You will have to use the default login page that comes with dap – that looks like this: http://DigitalAccessPass.com/dap/ . Of course, you don’t have to use our header image – you can replace it with your web site header and footer. For which, you have to at least know how to extract the HTML for the header & footer areas from your current web site. Or at least have someone who can help you with that.
- WordPress users have tons of customization options, which you won’t have when using a HTML/PHP only web site. Like the ability to switch themes, split the member area into multiple pieces – like “User Profile”, “My Content”, and “Affiliate Links” – and put them on 3 different pages on their WordPress blog. You won’t be able to do that. For you, it will all be on one, default member home page.
So, if you are a “power tweaker” and want more control on the little things in your membership site, then DAP on a HTML site may not work for you.
But if moving your entire web site over to WordPress is such a big task and pain that you don’t wish to (or can’t) deal with, or you are not too particular about power customizations, and just want your membership site to “just work” right out of the box, then DAP is perfect for you, because it can work with WordPress- and non-WordPress web sites.
What You CAN and CANNOT Do If You Have A Plain HTML Web Site (and don’t use WordPress)
- NO: Sneak-Peek
- NO: DAP Shortcodes
- NO: DAP Shopping Cart Plugin
- NO: WickedCoolPlugins.com Plugins
- NO: Comment-Protection for visitors
- NO: Login/Logout widget
- NO: Must use DAP’s default login page, that is only customizable with a header and footer – will take more work (and you must know HTML) if you want to make the login page look exactly like the rest of your web site
- NO: Must use DAP’s default member page, which contains the “My Content” page, “My Profile” and “My Affiliate Info” sections all rolled into one single page – you won’t be able to split them up into multiple pages like you can do with WordPress
- NO: Our Amazon S3 plugin S3MediaVault.com will not work on plain HTML sites
- NO: “In-Page” dripping won’t work
Instant Membership Site
One of the biggest advantages of using the HTML/PHP version of DAP (without WordPress) is that you can get started instantly with the pages that come right out of the box with DAP.
DAP has a ready-made login page which will be available at http://YourSite.com/dap/login.php
Once your members/buyers log in through that default log in page (can be customized as shown further below), they are taken to the default one-page member page, that lists all of the products or membership levels they’ve purchased, lists all of the content that is part of each of those products/levels, and that page also has the affiliate section and the member profile.
Bottom-line: Everything your members will need – the entire member dashboard – is available in one single page.
If you don’t need the affiliate section, that can be easily turned off via DAP Admin > Setup > Config.
See http://DigitalAccessPass.com/documentation/?page=/doc/creating-member-affiliate-sections-within-wordpress/ – all of those pages that you would have to create within WordPress, are readily available out of the box on this one default member home page.
So all you have to do, is create the buy buttons from within the DAP Admin pages, put that button on your sales page, and once your member signs up, they log in via http://YourSite.com/dap/login.php and they’re in. And they can get everything that they need on that one member dashboard page which is all readily setup and configured for you.
Screenshot Of Sample Login Page
You can customize header and footer HTML. Click image to enlarge.
Screenshot of Sample Members’ Area
You can customize header and footer HTML. Click image to enlarge.
How To Customize Content On dap/index.php
You can modify only a few sections on the default dap/index.php page.
Go to DAP Admin > Setup > Templates , and the following 4 items are related to content on the dap/index.php page.
- Content:Header
- Content:Footer
- Message:Affiliate
- Message:User
Those are the only 4 things you can modify, and nothing else.
If you wish to customize it more, then consider putting those sections within WordPress.
See http://DigitalAccessPass.com/documentation/?page=/doc/creating-member-affiliate-sections-within-wordpress/
2
Attaching Files To Autoresponder & Broadcast Emails
Uploading file to be attached
First upload file(s) to be attached to the emails, to the folder…
/dap/admin/attachments/
Attaching it to Autoresponder Emails
On the Email > Autoresponders page, any file(s) uploaded above, show up as in the image below. When composing a new email, just click on the “add” link next to the file name to be attached to that email.
Attaching it to Broadcast Emails
Same deal for broadcast emails. The uploaded file shows up as follows. Click on the “add” link to add to the broadcast email to be sent.
29
Coming Soon: DAP v3.9
[Updated: 09/27/2010]
Video 1: DAP/vBulletin Integration
[s3mv]vbintro.mp4,800,600,false,false[/s3mv]Video 2: Demo of vBulletin Integration
[s3mv]vbintro2.mp4,800,600,false,false[/s3mv]We’re about to launch DAP v3.9 which has some really cool new features packed into it! Here’s what is coming in 3.9…
vBulletin integration
This is by far the most exciting feature in 3.9. I don’t think even we, the developers of DAP, have been this excited about a new feature in the longest time! 🙂
This is going to completely ROCK your membership world.
Now, with just a few clicks of the mouse, you can completely automate your Forum management, and do some really slick stuff like…
* “Silver” Members get posting access only to the following vB forums…
– Introductions
– General Discussions
* “Gold” members get access to all above, plus the forum “Puppy Potty Training Tips”. So they get access to the following vB forums…
– Introductions
– General Discussions
– Puppy Potty Training Tips
* “Platinum” members get access to ALL of the forums above, PLUS some premium forums, like “Joint Ventures”, “Starting Your Own Dog Business”, “Premium Support”, and more. So they get access to…
– Introductions
– General Discussions
– Puppy Potty Training Tips
– Joint Ventures
– Platinum Mastermind
– Starting Your Own Dog Business
– Premium Support
And then you can add some more rules like…
Both Gold & Silver can just VIEW the “Premium Support” forums, but cannot POST anything.
And Gold & Silver CANNOT even VIEW the “Joint Ventures”, “Platinum Mastermind”, “Starting Your Own Dog Business”.
See how insanely powerful this can get?
Sure, you could have a forum with WP-based forum plugins like bbPress and Simple:Press too.
But comparing those WP forums to vBulletin? That’s like putting a kid who’s just completed one month of boxing lessons, in a ring with Mike Tyson right after someone said something mean about his mother!
And can you imagine what it would do to your “retention rate”, when you tell your members that if they cancel their subscription, they will lose access to the entire community of like minded people?
And to think that we’re just scratching the surface of monetizing forums here.
The vBulletin forum software is so rich in rules and user roles, and the DAP integration with vB is so tight that you could start just a “Forums Only” membership site and charge just for access to your forums!
Imagine creating a one-time product where for $10, they get to post in a “Special Offers” forum where they can advertise their product or service?
Or how about charging $10 to post in a forum called “Outsourcing”, where they can advertise their need to hire someone either for both long-term and short-term projects? It would be free to view for everyone, but you have to pay-to-post]
HTML Email
Now you can send out HTML email in your welcome emails, double-optin emails, autoresponder emails and broadcast emails. Of course, you still get to send out a “text” version of that same email, so that those email clients which cannot handle HTML (we really can’t think of any, though) can still show your member the “text” version. Pretty cool stuff.
Manual Transactions
Now if someone sends you a check in the mail, there is a way to directly enter the “payment amount” into the sytem. This is awesome on many levels:
1) Your DAP Dashboard reports now show you your earnings more accurately (previously, it didn’t know about the “offline” payments)
2) Because now there is a “manual” order in the system, DAP knows how much to pay the affiliate who referred the member. So Joe Customer clicks on Jill Affiliate‘s affiliate link, arrives at your web site, calls you up and says he doesn’t have a credit card or Paypal account, and would like to send you a check. Then you get a check in the mail. You add Joe manually through the DAP Dashboard (this is already possible). Then you now add a new transaction into the system manually, that Joe Customer paid you $100. Then when Joe Customer logs into your system, Jill’s affiliate link kicks in, DAP knows now that Joe paid $100, and Jill’s commission is 20% (what you have set as the admin).
So Jill now gets paid $20, which wouldn’t have been possible before!
And what’s EVEN more cool, is that if you really want to be super awesome to your affiliates (which we highly recommend you do :-), then you can even enter transactions retroactively – even from 2 years ago – and all of your affiliates will now suddenly start seeing commissions for customers they referred a long time ago, but never really got paid because you had no way of entering the offline transactions into the system.
Is that awesome? Or is that AWESOME? 🙂
Manual Affiliate Credits
Joe Customer purchased a product. He doesn’t seem to have been referred by any affiliate. Then you get an email from Jill – “Hey guys, I just referred my cousin Joe to your product using my affiliate link. He says he purchased it, but I never got any commissions. Can you please look into this?”
Previously, the only way to make sure Jill got the credit for Joe, was a slightly long-winded (and boring) manual process (which we won’t go into here), which really wasn’t hard to do, but still took you about 5 minutes.
Starting 3.9, it’s going to take you 5 seconds!
And Lots More To Come…
We have features that are even more exciting (something that’s not going to be easy to do, after the vBulletin launch!) planned for DAP 4.0!
* “N” tier affiliate program (psst… you read that right, not “2-tier”, not “3-tier” – but “N” tier- which means as many levels as you want, and each new tier with a different commission percentage!)
* Coupon Codes
And lots more…. (we can’t tell you just yet, because otherwise our competitors may steal our ideas 😉
Ok, now you know why we’re so excited about DAP 3.9.
So do let us know what you think in the comments section below.
And be sure to also subscribe to this post – because we’re going to shortly publish a video right here showing you some of the new features, as well as announce a pre-launch call that you’re not going to want to miss.
Cheers!
– Veena Prashanth & Ravi Jayagopal
9
Customizing User-facing CSS
Starting DAP v3.8, there is a file in the folder dap/inc/content/ called userfacing.css
Copy (not rename) it to a file called customuserfacing.css
Basically you are adding the word “custom” at the beginning of the file name.
Feel free to customize the CSS, and then upload it back to the same folder on your site.
This CSS file only impacts certain user-facing sections, like the User Links page, User Profile page and Affiliate Details section.
4
Creating Ready-made Banners & Copy For Affiliates
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.
%%AFF_LINK%%
5
WishList Migration Kit
We get many requests from folks wanting to switch their existing membership site from WishList to DAP, or from Amember to DAP, from Magic Member, YourMembers, eMember, Membergate, etc. We’ve honestly lost count of the number of migrations we’ve done over the years. And every single one of those users who switched to DAP, has been thrilled with DAP and has continued to stay with DAP ever since.
In almost all cases, they all wanted to switch their main “bread-and-butter” membership site over to DAP, because of many things that DAP does that the others don’t. Or maybe because their current membership plugin doesn’t let them do what they want to do, or because their developers stopped supporting it (or support is non-existent), or they’ve gone out of business, or simply because the plugins just don’t scale well for a large membership site, like DAP can.
Anyway, we decided to write a blog post about how to do that for those of you considering doing it yourself.
[NOTE] You don’t have to do this yourself – we can do the migration for you for a fee. See this link for details about purchasing our WishList-To-DAP Migration. [/NOTE]
1) Migrating “Free Members”
Moving free members over to DAP is very simple. Export your old members as a CSV (comma-separated) file containing just email, first name and last name(optional) in the following order:
Email,FirstName,LastName
Lastname is optional. No spaces before or after the comma’s.
And then import them on the “Users > Add” screen.
You can read more about importing users into DAP in this post.
2) Migrating “Paying Members” With Current Subscriptions
This is a bit trickier than migrating just free members. You not only have to import existing member information, but you also need to migrate over their existing subscriptions to point to DAP.
How this is done, primarily depends on what payment processor you were already using, and wish to continue to use while making sure all new incoming subscription payments get processed by DAP.
But before you migrate over their existing subscriptions, you have to import all of them first using DAP’s “Users > Add” screen, which allows you to import multiple users into a Product, while also marking them as “Paid”.
Before you do the import, be sure to empty both the “Double Optin” and “Thank-you” email subject and body on the Product page, because you don’t want DAP sending out any double-optin or thank-you emails to the members you are about to import. We can send them a broadcast email at a later point, when we’ve fully set them up correctly in the system.
Then once you’ve imported them all, you can modify each of their records quickly to modify their start and end dates, to sync with wherever they were in your previous WL site.
Then once you have all of their dates set up, all that remains is to integrate DAP with your payment processor, such that both payments from both new members as well existing members, all get processed by DAP, so that DAP continue to manage their subscriptions, and start giving them access to the member’s area, going forward.
Paypal Integration
Your current WishList subscriptions are probably already pointing to a WishList specific “virtual” URL. Unfortunately, Paypal will not allow you to modify the IPN url in existing “stored” subscriptions that are current.
So you will need to put in a new rule into your .htaccess file at the root of your web site, to simply redirect all incoming IPN notifications (that come to your WL virtual URL) to DAP’s Paypal-specific file on your site, which is http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-paypal.php
Here’s the exact line of text to place within your .htaccess file that’s in your root…
RewriteRule ^index.php/register/pgiotv$ /dap/dap-paypal.php [L]
Be sure to replace the text “index.php/register/pgiotv$” by the IPN URL given to you by wishlist.
Once this is done, DAP will start processing all future subscription payments from existing members.
3) IMPORTANT
Before you create any DAP Products and start protecting content within DAP, make sure you have disabled the Wishlist plugin. Also be sure to disable any other “content protection” plugins, like “Maintenance Mode”, and Cache plugins.