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Category Archives for "3rd Party Integration"
19

Importing Users In Bulk Into DAP

DAP allows you to easily import users in bulk from an external system or database.

Importing users in bulk is the same as adding users one at a time using the single-user-add feature. So whichever way you manually add users, DAP is going to all of the following…

  1. Create a new account for them using the email with which they’re being added
  2. Auto-generate a random, unique password for them
  3. Give them access to the product (into which they’re being imported or being added to)
  4. Send out the Welcome Email as per the product’s settings (this welcome email can be configured to send them the email & password to the member’s area along with anything else you want)
  5. Add them to the autoresponder series configured for that product
  6. … and so on.

When you do a single-user-add, all of this is done for that user in real-time. When you do a bulk-add, then all of the above happens for each user being imported, one at a time, when the DAP hourly cron job runs at the top of every hour. That’s the main difference.

Simple Import

Prerequisites For Simple Import

1) You must have already created the DAP Product into which the users will be imported

2) The user list has to be in a CSV (comma separated) format (one user per line)

For doing a simple import of user data containing just email, first and/or last name, the format of data (per user, per line) should be like this:

Email,FirstName,LastName

Email and FirstName are mandatory. But LastName is optional. So your user data row could be just…

Email,FirstName

Example:

Joe@example.com,Joe,Customer
Jill@anothersite.com,Jill
Bob@another.com,Bob,Member

How to do the actual Import

  1. Go to Users > Add > “Bulk-Add Multiple Users To A Product”
  2. Paste your CSV list into the large text area
  3. Select the Product into which you want to import the users
  4. Check the “Mark Users as Paid” checkbox if you want them to have “Paid” access to the content (just as if they are actual paying members). If you don’t check it, they will all have access as a “Free” user (instead of a “Paid” user), which means they will only have access to content within the Product that you have marked as “Free”.
  5. Click on the “Bulk Add Users” button. That will first save this entire list as a CSV file in your /dap/bulk folder on your site. And then, the next time the Hourly cron (dap-cron.php) runs, it will add them one by one to the product, and send them emails as per your Product set up. So if your Product has the “Thankyou-Email” subject and body filled out, it will individually send out each of the users that thankyou email.

Extended Import

DAP will also allow bulk import of users with extended profile information. This includes their existing password and other profile data as detailed in this video (Bulk Add Users)

But please make sure you are using at least DAP v4.2.1 and LiveLinks v1.7, because what’s explained below is only available only since then.

Pre-requisites For Extended Import

1) You must have already created the Product into which the users will be imported

2) The user list has to be in a CSV (comma separated) format (one user per line), with the exact format being:

Email,Firstname,Lastname,Password,ProductName, Address,City,State,Zip,Country,Phone,Company, Flag (to indicate Paid or Free user), Access Start Date, Access End Date,UserName

Example:

joe@somesite.com,Joe,Member,test123,Example One-time Product,99 hill ave,Cityname,NY,10001,USA,,Plug and Play Inc,y,2011-03-16, 2012-03-15,JoeMember

The only required fields are Email, FirstName and ProductName. If you do not want to supply a value for any of the optional fields, but still wish to import certain others, then just leave those fields empty in the data row (but the commas should remain) as shown below.

Email,Firstname,,,ProductName,,,,,,,,Flag (to indicate Paid or Free user), Access Start Date, Access End Date,UserName

How to do the actual Import

Create a file with the name /dap/bulk/importusers.csv file so it has the users you want to import in the format specified above.

Run this script on your browser to complete the import, by visiting:

http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-bulkImport.php

Note:

* Replace “YourSite.com” with your actual domain name

* Limit the number of users you are importing with this method to not more than 500 users (rows) at a time. Otherwise the import may timeout, because the import occurs real time, because you’re running the script manually, and not via cron. If the user already exists in dap, then the script will just skip that user and move on to the next user in the bulk add list.

10

Troubleshooting Email Delivery

Sending Email Through Your Web Site: The Basics

DAP is not an email service (like, say, Aweber).

DAP is just a script – a tool – like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird – that simply sends out email using your web host’s email server.

It is your web host’s mail server that actually sends out the email to the recipient. So once DAP notifies your mail server about a email that is to be sent, it has absolutely no control over what happens next.

It’s like when you put an envelope with a letter (regular mail) into the mailbox (post box). It is up to the Postal Service to actually pick up your letter, and deliver to the destination address. Your web host is like the Postal Service. If it doesn’t pick up and deliver the (e)mail, then DAP doesn’t have any say in it.

So if the emails that DAP sends out are not getting delivered to your recipients (or landing in the spam/junk folder of the recipient), there could be more than one reason for that.

Improving Email Delivery

DAP uses your web host’s email servers to send out emails.

Here are some ways to improve email deliverability and also avoid your email landing in the recipient’s junk/spam folder.

  • Check with your web host to make sure they have “Reverse DNS” setup and configured correctly for your domain. If not, then this is most likely the cause of emails not getting delivered.
  • Do not use a Gmail or Yahoo or some other web based email as the “From” email id (under DAP Admin > Setup > Config).
  • Instead, use a domain-based email id – like You@Yoursite.com or Support@Yoursite.com – as the “From” email id

If you are on a shared host, you may even consider totally by-passing sending emails through your web host, and instead use DAP’s “SMTP” feature to send emails out through an external email system – like Amazon’s SES (Simple Email Service) , Gmail or AuthSMTP.com.

Welcome Emails Not Going Out

If Admin notifications are going out ok, but the welcome email to the buyer/member is not being delivered, then see Troubleshooting Welcome-Email Delivery

Autoresponder Emails Not Going Out

If yours is a new site setup, then this is usually because the hourly cron-job has not been setup.

However, if the emails were going out fine previously, and suddenly stopped going out, then it usually is because…

  • Something changed on your host that caused the cron to stop working.
  • There is an error in the job queue, because of which DAP is unable to proceed with the remaining non-error emails. This could have happened if you tried to send out a broadcast to a CSV list, and there was an error in one of the emails from the CSV list.
  • You’re trying to use a third party “SMTP” server to send out the emails, and your server is unable to connect to that server because the authentication settings you’ve configured on “Email > SMTP” are incorrect.

Steps to troubleshoot

  1. Make sure that the hourly cron (dap-cron.php) is still running – you need to look at your web hosting control panel for that.
  2. Go to “System > Job Queue” and scroll through any items there, and see if there are any scheduled messages there with the status “Error”. If yes, then click on the “Delete Jobs In Error” link. That will delete any jobs that can’t be processed because of an error in the email id or in the import process. Also be sure to click on “Delete Successful Jobs (till yesterday)” just to clear up old, sent emails.
  3. Also go to “System > Logs” and empty the logs.
  4. Go to “System > Config” and set “DAP Log Level” to “5”. That will start logging all the details you/we may need for troubleshooting.
  5. Wait for the top of the next hour and then re-visit the queue and see if emails are going out.
  6. If they still aren’t going out, go back to “System > Logs”, copy paste all text there, and open a new ticket with that info, of course, also giving us more details about the problem, what you have tried, etc, along with your login info for: FTP, WP Admin, DAP Admin, and Web Host Control Panel.

Server Blacklisting

If your inexpensive (read as cheap 🙂 shared web host is hosting a large number of sites on one server, and one of them knowingly sends out spam (or mistakenly gets flagged for spam), that will put the email deliverability of every web site on that server in jeopardy, because your site now shares the same IP address as that of an “alleged” spammer.

So your emails get sent to junk/spam folder by Gmail and Yahoo. Or worse, they just totally disappear into the ether.

Hourly Email-Sending Limits

Almost all shared hosts have hourly email sending limits. For example, DreamHost has an outgoing limit of 300 emails per hour. Which means, a total of only 300 emails can be sent out per hour through any web site hosted on DreamHost. All of the following count towards the 300 limit:

  • Emails sent by any scripts on your site – like DAP
  • Your WordPress blog notification emails
  • Your WordPress admin emails,
  • WP forgot password emails,
  • WP comment notification emails,
  • Forum notification emails,
  • Forum emails sent to each other by your users,
  • Forum-software Admin notification emails,
  • Support software user and admin notification emails
  • Tell-a-friend emails
  • Viral-inviter type emails
  • Emails sent through Outlook or Thunderbird where you have set the outgoing SMTP server to be your web site’s SMTP server
  • Emails sent by others using the same SMTP server to send out emails-  like your business partners, employees, etc
  • DAP User welcome emails, Payment notification emails, Forgot password emails, Autoresponder emails, Broadcast emails, etc

So do you see how quickly you can go over that hourly limit of 300 emails per hour?

But here comes the worst part…

Once you go over that limit, any emails that are actually sent by you or the scripts running on your site, will not actually result in any kind of error. The mail server will respond by saying that the email(s) has been sent successfully, but in reality, on the backend, it quietly “snuffs out” the email. Which means, it doesn’t go anywhere – just gets sent to a “blackhole”. So you keep thinking that you sent out the email. DAP keeps thinking it has sent out the email. But in reality, the emails never actually get sent.

This is the same as you actually putting your letter into the mailbox at the Post Office. But then, imagine this: The postal worker who comes to pick up your mail, quietly goes to the back of the post office and dumps it all into one giant trash can, and destroys all of the mail. So you’re thinking you actually mailed out that important check to pay your utility bill. But the utility company never gets your check, and they slam you with a late fee.

Possible Solutions

1) BEST OPTION: DAP + 3rd party SMTP service provider like Amazon SES, AuthSMTP.com or SMTP.com. (much less expensive than Aweber, and very reliable too)

2) DAP + Aweber (more expensive, very reliable)

3) DAP + Good web host (cheapest option, but can lead to mixed results – depends on your host).

You could always use DAP and external SMTP service provider like Amazon SES, AuthSMTP.com or SMTP.com to send out bulk mail through DAP while totally bypassing your web host’s email system. This is probably the first best option where DAP controls the composition and sending of the email, the 3rd party service controls the deliverability.

Next best option is using a service like Aweber or GetResponse.

And if you can’t afford even that, then simply use DAP on a good web host. We ourselves use just DAP and LiquidWeb’s email servers to send out emails to all of our users.

And DAP also has built-in job queues to schedule outgoing emails while also making sure that you don’t exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits (dreamhost’s limit is 300 emails/hour, I think). We use multiple SMTP servers from our own other web sites, all combined to be able to send a few thousand emails per hour.

But even with a lot of planning, it is easy to go over the hourly limit.

So the next time you see in your Job Queue that emails were sent out successfully, but the recipient never received it, here are some things to check:

1) It landed in your recipient’s junk/spam folder. Ask them to whitelist or add your email address to their contacts list.

2) You have overshot the limit, so you would have to actually send out the email again.

3) Try to send out broadcasts during a low-traffic time – say like later in the night – when you’re not actively sending out emails, and using up precious email counts from that hourly quota.

http://DigitalAccessPass.com/documentation/?page=/doc/troubleshooting-email-delivery/

1

Troubleshooting 1ShoppingCart Integration

There are a few different reasons why this may not be working.

1. Check if Cron is running

The DAP email-processing cron that processes the 1SC emails may not be running. Check your webhost control panel -> Cron job settings. Make sure dap-emailorder.php is setup to run once every 10 minutes.

2. Incorrect Setup of Billing Email Id

The billing email id you have entered in DAP at Setup > Config > Payment Processing , should be entered into the “Order Notice Email – Primary Destination” field in your 1SiteAutomation/1Shoppingcart account, on the Setup > Orders > Notifications section. If by chance you enter it into the “Order Notice Email – Primary Destination” field, it WILL NOT WORK.

3. No Notification Emails from 1SC

The DAP cron is running but 1SC payment notification emails are not reaching your mail server. Check the email account where you expect to receive your 1SC payment notification emails and see if the order notification email from 1SC is in that mail box.

4. Incorrect Mail Server Settings

The cron is running and the 1SC order notification email is reaching your mail server – but you did not configure the mail server settings correctly in DAP Dashboard -> Setup -> Config -> Payment Processing.

Email Server Where Order Emails Come In
Email Server User Name
Email Server Password

5.”Read” Or Deleted Emails

DAP only processes order notification emails that are in the “Unread” status, to prevent previously processed emails and other non-DAP emails from being repeatedly processed.

Also, if you “pop” off the emails from that mail box (means, your email client like Outlook or Thunderbird or Gmail is “removing” your emails from the server when it retrieves them), it means that when DAP logs in to that billing email address, there are no emails there to be processed – the mailbox is empty, or the 1SC payment notification emails have somehow gotten deleted from that mailbox.

So it is possible that DAP is able to connect to your email server, but DAP is not finding any “unread” emails. Please login to your email server and mark all the payment emails that you want DAP to process… as “unread”. And also make sure that your email client does not remove the emails from that mail box.

6.Product Name Mismatch

There might be a “Product Name” mismatch. The product name has to be EXACTLY the same (including case, spaces, etc) in both DAP as well as in 1ShoppingCart. So if you have created a product by name “Widget A”, make sure your 1shoppingcart product also has the exact same name “Widget A”.

If everything is setup correctly, DAP cron will run every 10 minutes and try to process all 1SC emails.

The next time the DAP cron will run (every 10 minutes), it will pick up all the unread payment emails from 1SC.

7. Empty “Thankyou-Email Body/Subject”

Welcome email is not getting sent.

Select the product, and make sure there is some text in the “Thankyou-Email Subject” and “Thankyou-Email Body”. Whatever is in these fields is what gets sent immediately after someone purchases that product (or right after you give them access from the backend).

Now go to DAP Dashboard -> Users -> Add .

Select the product and manually add user. Now see if the thankyou email gets sent to that email id. If it got sent, then your product setup is correct.

Also check the DAP Dashboard -> Orders . Search for all orders, look up the order for the particular user in question by email.

Check the payment status and make sure there is no error there.

If you did all this and things are still not working, please do this:

1. Set DAP Dashboard > setup -> Config -> Log Level -> Log All activity
2. Re-run the 1SC test purchase
3. Check the DAP Logs (DAP Dashboard > System > Logs) and send us the log text in there for troubleshooting by pasting it into a new support ticket.

8. Sending Email & Password To Buyer

Make sure you have set the thank-you message with the right merge tags for Email and Password.

9. Manually Running Cron

First set DAP Dashboard > setup -> Config -> Log Level -> Log All activity

If you feel that the orders were not processed in dap, then just login to the 1SC email account where the sales/payment notification emails are sitting, and mark those orders/emails as UNREAD that you want dap to process.

Then manually run the cron script dap-emailorder.php cron by visiting the following link in the browser.

http://www.yoursite.com/dap/dap-emailorder.php

Replace yoursite.com with the name of your site.

It will just display an empty screen when complete.

Then check “Users > Manage” to see if user has been created.

– Veena Prashanth

21

Protecting Videos

There are many ways in which you can protect videos.

Case 1: The video file is stored on your web site

By default, DAP can only protect files that are stored on the same web site where DAP is installed.

So if you install DAP on YourSite.com , then your files must also be located on YourSite.com. DAP installed on YourSite.com cannot protect files (.mp4, .mp3, .html, .pdf, .doc) that are stored on AnotherSite.com.

So assuming the files are stored on the same site as DAP, you can (and should) protect both the actual video file, as well as the blog post or page in which the embed-code for your video is published, by adding both to a Product.

This gives you 2 levels of protection for your videos:

Level 1: The blog post or page containing the video player code, itself is accessible only by authorized members.
Level 2: When an authorized user gets legitimate access to the page where the video is published (because they’re a paying member, say), even if they try to do a view source and figure out the location of the video (eg., http://yoursite.com/videos/howtovideo1.mp4) , and pass it around by email to their friends (or post the link in an online forum), their friends still can’t view the video, because the video link itself is protected by DAP.

If you have some text that you want the casual visitor (and Google) to read, but wish to protect only the video, then you could turn Sneak-Peek on (in Setup > Config > Advanced), insert a WordPress more tag (<!–more–>) into your post just where you want the content to start being protected, and put the video player’s embed code after the more tag.

Case 2: Video file is stored on Amazon S3

The only 3rd-party-stored video files that DAP can protect at this time are videos (and other files) that are stored on Amazon S3. DAP cannot do this by itself, but uses a special WordPress plugin called S3MediaVault.com , which is a plugin we developed specifically to make Amazon S3 videos play in your WordPress blog posts/pages. So again you get 2 levels of protection for your videos…

Level 1: DAP protects the post/page where the special S3MV video player code is embedded
Level 2: The S3MediaVault plugin makes sure that even if someone tried to do a view source and figure out the actual link to your Amazon S3 video, they still won’t be able to view the video.

WARNING: Video stored on other 3rd party video sites

DAP cannot protect, say, videos that are embedded from other 3rd party web sites like YouTube or Hulu. Of course, DAP can always protect the blog post or page itself that contains the video, but once an authorized user gets valid access to that blog page, they can see that it is a YouTube video (say), and then pass that YouTube video link to their friends, in which case DAP cannot protect that external YouTube video link.

Check out my podcast episode at http://subscribeme.fm/video-hosting-for-your-membership-site/ which goes into detail about video hosting for your membership site.

22

DAP vs Aweber

(Or… “DAP vs MailChimp”, “DAP vs. GetResponse”, “Amazon vs Web Host”, …. “DAP vs 3rd-Party-List-Service”)

Quick Summary: Here’s what we recommend, in the order listed below:

1) DAP + Amazon SES: Best option – this is what we use ourselves here at DigitalAccessPass.com and WickedCoolPlugins.com.

2) DAP + ActiveCampaign: If you must sign up for a third-party service for their advance analytics, we highly recommend ActiveCampaign, which is a very robust and popular email service, which we recommend over even, say, Aweber. This #2 option is great if you want advanced email analytics – like click-thru rates or open-rates – that DAP itself doesn’t offer yet. You will still be able to add the subscriber/buyer to both DAP and ActiveCampaign, for eg., and you will have the choice of sending out the emails from either system. This offers more flexibility, but comes at a cost of the services like ActiveCampaign or Aweber.

3) DAP + Your Web Host: Very usable and workable option as long as you are hosting with a decent web host.

Now, for some background information…

We often get asked why use Aweber (or other third-party list service) when DAP itself has a built-in Autoresponder system as well as an Email Broadcast system. So here’s a brief overview of when and why it makes sense to use DAP – or ActiveCampaign/Aweber/MailChimp/GetResponse, etc.

Why DAP Rocks

DAP integrates with Amazon SES  (Simple Email Service), which allows you to send out tens of thousands of emails a day using DAP. Which means that it will only cost you pennies to send out a large volume of email via DAP (just $0.10 per 1,000 emails). So imagine the power of DAP and the deliverability of Amazon in one sweet, integrated system!

Until quite recently, it used to be that the biggest advantage of using a third-party service like Aweber was their email delivery rate. But with the onslaught of high-powered, high-deliverability but-still-inexpensive services like Amazon SES, the advantage now shifts more towards DAP.

Also, when you use a third-party service, like Aweber, and you send out an email and a number of people mark it as spam (incorrectly or not), your account could get shutdown without notice, and you would lose your entire list (unless of course, you have been maniacally exporting the data every few days and storing it on your computer in the form of a CSV file, the chances of which are highly unlikely).

But when you use DAP with say, Amazon SES, your “list” is still stored within the DAP database on your web site. So you always own the list, and the data is always going to be there on your web site, even if you stopped using DAP. And if the same spam issue happens with SES, then Amazon will probably shut down your SES account too – but in this case, that’s not a bank-breaker, because you can sign up with a different email provider, like AuthSMTP.com, or SMTP.com, or Mandrill, integrate DAP with this new email service, and resume your emails like nothing ever happened. Obviously, we’re not telling you this as a way to spam people. The point is that nowadays, people who don’t want your messages any more, instead of unsubscribing, will sometimes mark your email as spam. And when stuff hits the fan, that’s when it’s nice to have some options (like DAP + SES), instead of losing your entire list.

But first, some basics…

DAP is not an email service like Aweber or ActiveCampaign.

DAP is just a tool – like Outlook or Thunderbird – that simply sends out email using your web host’s email server, but in an automated fashion, of course.

If your inexpensive shared web host is hosting a large number of sites on one server, and one of them sends out spam (or mistakenly gets flagged for spam), that will put the email deliverability of every web site on that server, in jeopardy, because your site now shares the same IP address as that of an “alleged” spammer. So your emails could get sent to junk/spam folder by Gmail and Yahoo. Or worse, they just totally disappear into the ether. Some customers won’t get your emails. This won’t happen with Aweber (for the most part).

Aweber (and other premier email service providers) have staff on hand just for this purpose. Their core business is about email deliverability. They spend a lot of time, money and resources dealing with regular ISP’s (like AOL and SBC) to make sure their lists – and their reputation – remain clean. Which is also probably why they shut down large lists without much of a warning to you, and do other similar crazy stuff.

I guess it works for them – and the other Aweber users, because when you send out an email through your Aweber list, it almost always gets there in your recipient’s inbox. Which is very cool. And which is why they also charge so much for their service.

And that’s where DAP comes in.

You can use DAP’s built-in email autoresponder and broadcast system, and send out emails through your web host. But that normally means that the deliverability of those emails is only as good as your web host’s deliverability. And if you’re not on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Dedicated server, then relying on your cheap, shared web host to safely deliver your email to your members is totally unrealistic and naive – just ain’t gonna happen.

And that’s where the 3rd-Party SMTP feature of DAP comes in real handy – this is one of the un-sung features of DAP that makes it so much more powerful than almost all other competing WordPress membership plugins, and just doesn’t get talked about enough.

You can use DAP as an “Email-Sending Tool” and hook it up to an external SMTP service provider – like Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), Fusemail.com or AuthSMTP.com – to send out bulk-mail through DAP – while completely bypassing your web host’s email system.

Which means you get high email delivery, thanks to a 3rd party SMTP provider like Amazon SES that practically guarantees you sky-high deliverability rates and rock-bottom rates, and you can host hundreds of thousands of emails in DAP for no charge other than standard hosting fees (it’s after all just disk-space in your database), and send emails through Amazon SES (costs just 10 cents for every 1,000 emails you send).

Don’t wish to pay even those few pennies? Then simply use DAP on a decent web host like Liquid Web.

DAP also has a built-in job queue to schedule outgoing emails, with the ability to throttle the number to make sure that you don’t exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits (most web hosts limit you to 300 outgoing emails/hour).

You can even use multiple SMTP servers from your own other lesser-used web sites, all combined together in a round-robin fashion, be able to send thousands of emails an hour right from your web host for absolutely free!

So, to summarize, here’s what DAP can and can-not do when compared to more expensive, dedicated email services like Aweber and GetResponse.

Advantage: DAP

  • Aweber and similar services cost several hundred dollars a year (see Aweber.com – it could cost you about $794 a year – based on an annual fee of $194/year + another $600/year for maintaining a list size of just 5,000 subscribers). But all emails sent via DAP are essentially FREE! You don’t pay anything to send out thousands of emails and have a list with tens of thousands of members. The Autoresponder & Broadcast features are built right into the core DAP software.
  • Don’t trust your web host to deliver the emails? Simply hook up DAP to an external email system like Amazon SES and send thousands of emails for mere pennies! Takes all of 5 minutes to set up!
  • Unlimited Autoresponders
  • Store Unlimited email id’s for free (no limit on how large your list can grow – so it’s practically free, since you’ve already paid for DAP and your web hosting)
  • Full control over your list. You can make the sign-ups single opt-in. You can add your buyers to your list without forcing double opt-in on them. Services like Aweber will force double opt-in even when it’s a paid member who just purchased your product or service. And there’s no way around it. And you have to play by their rules, even if they don’t make sense sometimes. But since you control the DAP software, you get to decide who to send out broadcast or autoresponder emails to. Bring them all in as single-optin if you want. Or move them from one list to another. Or add them to multiple lists. Whatever you want.
  • Import any CSV list (just need an email) and broadcast to them or add them to your autoresponder. You don’t even have to add them to your database at all – do on-the-fly mailings without storing any of the emails or subscriber data (imagine sending out a quick email blast to your mastermind group – or soccer team parents!). A very powerful tool – so don’t abuse it (i.e., don’t use it to spam!)
  • Add same email to multiple Autoresponders (unique to DAP)
  • Email throttling included, so as to not exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits
  • DAP has a stunning-looking “Lightbox” plugin with several built-in templates, to show your DAP signup form as a popup. See List Builder Popup for DAP
  • Ability to merge member data – like password or affiliate link or user id – right into the emails (DAP only). Third-party email services won’t know as much about your members as DAP does, and won’t be able to (say) send members their personalized affiliate link (like DAP can).
  • International-friendly: Using DAP, you can send out autoresponder and broadcast emails in multiple languages. Not restricted to just English. DAP now supports Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Danish, French, Italian, and Hindi – and that’s just what we know! DAP will surely work with any language that is UTF-8 based. We don’t think any of the big third-party email marketing services – like Aweber or GetResponse – support non-English emails. This in itself is a HUGE plus for DAP.

Advantage: Aweber and the others

  • Ability to track open rates and click-through rates (coming in a future version in DAP)
  • Ability to automatically send out your newly published blog posts as a broadcast (also coming in a future version in DAP)

So given a choice, here’s what we recommend, in the order listed below:

1) DAP + Amazon SES: Best option – this is what we use ourselves here at DigitalAccessPass.com and WickedCoolPlugins.com.

2) DAP + ActiveCampaign: If you must sign up for a third-party service for their advance analytics, we highly recommend ActiveCampaign, which is a very robust and popular email service, which we recommend over even, say, Aweber. This #2 option is great if you want advanced email analytics – like click-thru rates or open-rates – that DAP itself doesn’t offer yet. You will still be able to add the subscriber/buyer to both DAP and ActiveCampaign, for eg., and you will have the choice of sending out the emails from either system. This offers more flexibility, but comes at a cost of the services like ActiveCampaign or Aweber.

3) DAP + Your Web Host: Very usable and workable option as long as you are hosting with a decent web host.

Feel free to comment below if you have any questions.

25

WordPress User Sync

NOTE: This content is for advanced users only, who understand the concept of user tables, database, etc. If you don’t understand any of this, then just ignore this – you don’t really need to know this in order to use DAP. This is only an explanation for those who wish to go under the hood of DAP and its integration with WordPress.

As you probably already know, WordPress has its own user database.

DAP has its own User database, and doesn’t use the WordPress database – for many reasons, not limited to the following…

1) Ability to store more user information than what WordPress allows

2) More powerful user search, profile updates, affiliate information, etc.

So, if you want to use any WordPress based plugins – like WordPress Forums or Subscribe2Blog – these forums are looking at WordPress’ native user database.

Now comes the necessity of “syncing” the DAP user data and your WordPress user data.

In the DAP Dashboard, in “Setup > Config > Advanced“, you will see two settings for syncing DAP & WP user data.

(1) Sync DAP User data and WP User data

If you turn this to “Y” (for “Yes”), then every time someone logs into DAP, their DAP user data (just name and email) is automatically “synced” with WordPress user data. If you set this to “N”, then no data will be transferred from DAP to WordPress.

(2) Sync WP data only for PAID users

This one matters only if you have set (1) above to “Y”.

If you want only your “PAID” members to be synced with WordPress, then set this to “Y“.

If you want both “FREE” and “PAID” members synced with WordPress, then set this to “N“.

Here’s how it actually works:

  1. For the sync to work, you must first setup and save the above 2 config settings
  2. After you save the above two config settings, make sure you log out of DAP and re-log in (if you are/were logged in and testing as a regular user), because only then, the Config settings above will take effect.
  3. Your user must log in through a DAP login form (not the WP login form).
  4. Make sure the user is redirected to any part of your WordPress blog after log in. This can be done via “Logged In URL” setting in DAP Config.
  5. The user can be redirected to any WP page, WP post or even your blog home page – that’s the only time the ‘syncing’ kicks in.
  6. When user lands on any page/post of your WP blog, then the DAP LiveLinks plugin (which you have already installed & enabled) kicks of the “sync”, copies the logged in member’s name and email over to the WordPress user table, and also automatically logs him into your WordPress blog.

That’s all there is to it.

Also see: Forum Integration

66

Forum Integration

DAP currently integrates with all WordPress-based Forum plugins (some of them mentioned below) as well as two non-WP based (vB & XenForo).

So if a member logs in to your membership site via the DAP login form, then they will also automatically be logged in to your forum. That’s called “Single Sign-on” and DAP supports it with all of the above forum software.

Which Forum To Use With DAP?

The WordPress-based forums listed above (Simple:Press, Mingle, etc) are not really full-featured (like XenForo or vBulletin). DAP doesn’t – and cannot – protect individual forum posts or threads if you used the basic WordPress-based forums. But they’re all free, have pretty decent forum features, easy to set up and use, and will work just fine for most people.

However, if you want a more full-featured forum software that will give you greater control over many details, allow you to protect content at a thread or forum level, and want tons of user and admin features, then we highly recommend going with XenForo (XF) or vBulletin (vB). XF and vB are not free, have a slightly bigger learning curve than the simple WP forum plugins, and require more setup and maintenance overall. And if you want the best forum plugin, and are willing to pay the price (dollar-wise as well as effort-wise) and put in the time to set it up, then XF is the way to go, and DAP integrates extremely well with XF.

Now, the rest of this post is about integration of DAP with the WordPress-based forums.

(For XenForo integration details, click here)

(For vB integration details, click here)

 

Integration with BuddyPress, bbPress, Simple:Press, Mingle, etc

What this essentially achieves, is that once your forum plugin has been integrated with DAP (explained below), anyone who is a member in your DAP-powered membership site, will also be automatically be logged in to your forum when they log in to your membership site.

So they won’t have to log in twice [like, once into DAP and once into your forum].

Here’s how you set up the DAP/forum integration.

  1. Download the 3rd party WordPress forum plugin
  2. Install it as per their instructions. We don’t support the installation or setup of the forum plugin itself.
  3. Log in to your DAP Admin Dashboard and click on “Setup > Config”.
  4. You have two settings on the page that applies to forum integration:
    “Sync DAP User data and WP User data”
    “Sync WP data only for PAID users“
  5. Pick “Y” or “N” for each of them, and you’re all set.

Now, a quick explanation of both settings.

1) Sync DAP User data and WP User data

If you turn this to “Y” (for “Yes”), then every time someone logs into DAP, they’re automatically logged into WordPress too (with a “user” WordPress role). And because they’re logged into WordPress, that means they’re also logged into your forum (because you are using a WordPress-based Forum Plugin which already integrates with your WordPress installation)

2) Sync WP data only for PAID users

This one matters only if you have set (1) above to “Y”.

So once you have decided to turn on the DAP/Forum plugin integration, then if you want only your “PAID” members to have access to the forum, then set this to “Y”.

If you want both FREE and PAID users accessing your forum, then set this to “N”.

17

Buy Buttons, 1-Click Upsells, Downsells & OTO’s using Authorize.net

Selling through Authorize.net, 1-Click Upsells, Downsells and One-Time Offers (OTO’s) are all now extremely simple to implement using the new Shopping Cart Plugin for DAP.

This post explains how to create buy buttons for selling through Authorize.net.

Your site visitors never have to leave your site in order to make a purchase, if you are selling through Authorize.net. DAP itself will act as your shopping cart, and buyers can checkout and make purchases by staying right on your web site.

The DAP Shopping Cart itself is your actual shopping cart that connects to Authorize.net. You need to install this plugin whether you wish to accept one-time or subscription payments via Authorize.net, or whether you wish to do Upsells, and Downsells.

What you need before you can use this plugin

  1. You need an Authorize.net merchant account
  2. If you want to sell subscription-based products, then you also need Automated Recurring Billing (ARB) enabled in your Authorize.net account.
  3. You must have SSL (secure server) enabled on your web site. Ask your web host to enable SSL for your site.
  4. You must have a working version of DAP 3.5+.

Installation & Setup of UpsellTree

  1. You need be using at least DAP v3.5 for this.
  2. If you haven’t installed DAP already, then install DAP first.
  3. Log in to our member’s area and download the plugin file, DAPShoppingCart.zip .
  4. Unzip DAPShoppingCart.zip to your desktop. It will unzip the files to a new folder on your desktop, called DAPShoppingCart.
  5. Upload ALL of the files inside, DIRECTLY to your “dap” folder on your web site. DO NOT upload the folder itself – just the files inside.
  6. Log in to your Authorize.net account, and go to the “Settings” page.
  7. Click on Silent Post URL.
    authnet_silentpost
  8. On the next page, set the URL field, to  http://YourSite.com/dap/dap-silentpost.php . Be sure to change the text “YourSite.com” to your actual domain name. Click “Submit”. It will take you back to the Settings page.
    authnet_silentpost_submit
  9. On the Settings page, now click on the “API Login ID and Transaction Key” link towards the bottom.
    authnet_settings
  10. On the next page, make a note of your “API Login ID” and “Transaction Key” on a piece of paper (or copy/paste it into a text file). That page also lets you create a new Transaction key or modify your existing one.
  11. That’s it for Authnet.
  12. Now, log in to your DAP Dashboard on your side, and go to “DAP Admin > Setup > Config > Payment Processing“.
  13. Enter the “API Login ID” and “Transaction Key” that you noted down earlier (Step #9 above) into the respective fields, and click  “Update” next to the fields to save the changes.
    authnet_dap_config
  14. This step applies to you only if you are already using 1ShoppingCart with DAP (if not, skip to next step):
    Be sure to remove the “Email Order” cron job from your web hosting control panel (“Cron Jobs” screen), because you don’t want your orders to be double-processed.
  15. Go to the Products > Manage.
    newproductspage
    A) Product Price: For a 1-time purchase product, this is the product’s purchase price. For a recurring product, this is the “recurring” price (what the customer gets charged month after month).
    B) Trial Amount: This is only if there’s a trial amount. If no trial, leave this empty.
    C) Recurring Count: How long is your subscription? If you said “Forever”, then enter the number 9999 here. If it ends after 6 months, then enter 6 here.
  16. Set these fields to valid values.
  17. NOTE: The DAP Authorize.net allows 1 trial. So in the recurring cycle fields, make sure “Payment/Trial Period #2” and “Payment/Trial Period #3” are both the same (set to same number of days: like 30). Example below shows the setting for a “7 day” trial period, followed by recurring payments every “30 days”.
    authnet_recurring_cycle
  18. If you are not offering a trial, then just set the Trial Amount to $0.00. But if you really wanted to offer a FREE TRIAL, then you must set the Trial Amount to at least $0.01 (1 penny).
  19. Once you’ve saved the product, you can now click on any of the two new “Generate… Button Code” links that are located right below the product list combo box.
    newproductspage2
  20. “Generate Authnet Buy Button” link:
    This generates the buy button HTML code for your product, which you can then directly paste into your sales page. When you click on this link, you will get a pop-up that shows the actual HTML code for your button. The price, trial price, and recurring options are all taken from your Product settings. So make sure you have saved your Product changes before you click on this link.
    authnet_buybutton_code
  21. Here’s what the HTML code looks like:
    <form name="generate_authnet" method="post" action="https://www.contentresponder.com/dap/buy.php">
    <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Example Subscription Product"/>
    <input type="hidden" name="description" value="This is a dummy Subscription Product with a monthly subscription - payments every 30 days." />
    <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="1.00" />
    <input type="hidden" name="trial_amount" value="0.01" />
    <input type="hidden" name="total_occurrences" value="9999" />
    <input type="hidden" name="is_recurring" value="Y" />
    <input type="hidden" name="recurring_cycle_1" value="30" />
    <input type="hidden" name="recurring_cycle_2" value="30" />
    <input type="hidden" name="recurring_cycle_3" value="30" />
    <input type="hidden" name="payment_succ_page" value="https://www.contentresponder.com/dap/continue.php?url=/dap/upsell1.html" />
    <input type="hidden" name="payment_gateway" value="authnet" />
    <input type="hidden" name="is_submitted" value="Y" />
    <input type="submit" value="Buy Now" />
    </form>
  22. If you’re doing upsells, the only thing you need to do is, look for the “payment_succ_page” field in the above form. By default it is pointing to:
    https://www.contentresponder.com/dap/continue.php?url=/dap/upsell1.html
  23. Modify the “upsell1.html” file within your dap folder, to make your 1-Click Upsell offer. Or if you don’t wish to use 1-Click upsells, you can make just about any kind of upsell offer on that page. The upsell1.html that comes with the plugin has a sample upsell page already created for you, just so you get an idea of what that will look like.
  24. On the upsell page, if you want to upsell say, Product B, then make sure you set up “Product B” ahead of time in DAP, and set up the price and recurring options. Then for upsell products only, click on the “Generate Authnet 1-Click Upsell” link to generate the 1-Click Upsell Buy button code, as the upsell buy button is slightly different than the ‘regular’ buy button code. Now take the upsell buy button code like you did before, and paste it in upsell1.html. That’s it.
  25. You can repeat this process for unlimited upsells, downsells and one-time offers. No limits.

That’s it.

While it looks like a LOT of steps, that is only because we have to explain the steps in detail so they are clear. In reality, it is very simple to set up, and starting from scratch, if you have DAP & SSL already installed, it shouldn’t take you more than 1/2 hour to set up your 1-Click Upsells/Downsells/OTO’s. And if you’re not using Upsells/Downsells, then it can be done even faster.

If you have any further questions, feel free to open a support ticket, and we will assist you in getting this going.
50

DAP’s Incredibly Powerful Affiliate Program

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, rare and powerful features in DAP, that you won’t find in most 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) Global Affiliate Link

There’s just one “core” (default) affiliate link that your affiliates can use to promote your web site, and regardless of which product the referral ends up buying, your affiliate gets paid on all of those purchased products.

So it’s like an Amazon affiliate link. One global link that gets you paid on any resulting purchases. So your specific affiliate link could be promoting a book, electronic gadget, shoe or clothing. And once your referral gets to Amazon.com after clicking your affiliate link, even if they don’t purchase that specific product that you just them to, and go on to purchase ANY other product from the entire Amazon.com catalog (which are commission-eligible, of course), then you’ll make commissions on any resulting sale. That’s exactly how the DAP affiliate program works too. Just one default affiliate link. Affiliate can redirect visitor to any landing page (see details below), and affiliate gets paid for any resulting sales.

3) 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.

Other Built-In Affiliate Features

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

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