Disabling The Built-In Affiliate Program

There are many reasons for wanting to have more control over the affiliate program – or even completely disable it for the entire web site.

1) You simply don’t wish to let people know that you have an affiliate program – maybe it is because you don’t want to confuse the mom-and-pop niche that you are in with crazy words like “Affiliate” and “Commission” :-). Or you just don’t need affiliates and don’t wish to pay commissions

2) You want to allow only certain users to be affiliates. You don’t want every member to automatically become affiliates.

3) You are using a 3rd party affiliate service – like ClickBank – and don’t wish to use DAP’s built-in affiliate program.

Completely Disabling The Affiliate Program

This is easy to do. Don’t announce any affiliate program. Don’t say anywhere that you have one, or that you’re offering commissions. Do not setup commissions for your products. Do not create an “Affiliate Info” page, so no one will know what their affiliate link is, and since no commissions are set, no one will get paid anything.

Basically, don’t do anything to set up any of the the affiliate stuff, and that’s as good as having no affiliate program.

Signing Up Affiliates

See this post

Allowing Only Hand-Picked Affiliates

If you do not want all members to become affiliates, and only want people you want – like your business associates and JV partners – to be the only affiliates, then…

a) Create a separate product called Affiliates. But do not publish a public sign-up form for that product. So no one can sign-up for that, and the only way to get access to it is if you manually added them in from the DAP Admin Users > Add screen.

b) Create the Affiliate Info page that displays all of the affiliate information and stats. But add that page only to this Affiliates product, and not to any other product. So only those with access to the Affiliates product can even get to the Affiliate Info page.

Hide Affiliate Info On dap/index.php (Non WP)

If you are using DAP with a non-WordPress site, or simply using the the default http://YourSite.com/dap/index.php page as your members’ area, then all you have to do is go to…

DAP Admin > Setup > Config > Display Affiliate Details

… and set it to “N”.

That will essentially “hide” the affiliate section from showing up on the default DAP home page (at http://YourSite.com/dap/index.php)

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NOTE: In a future version of DAP, we will have the ability to selectively turn off an individual’s ability to use their affiliate link, so DAP will completely ignore all referrals from the affiliate, and won’t track anything from them.

How To Use DAP’s Default Password

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

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

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

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

Setup > Config > Default Password

This can be found under the Miscellaneous section on that page.

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

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

Hello {!firstname},

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

Email: {!email}
Password: changethis

Thank you,

– Admin from Example.com

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

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

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

Customizing Login Form

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

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

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

To…

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

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

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

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