4

Creating A Ready-Made Affiliate Toolbox

You already know that DAP has a built-in affiliate program, and everyone who joins your site (or gets a free or paid account) is automatically made into an “Instant Affiliate”.

DAP also lets you create an Affiliate Tool Box for your affiliates, with ready-to-use banners, emails, subjects, signatures and text links – all with their own personalized affiliate link embedded into it already.

So all they have to do is copy, paste, and hit send.

See the sample screen-shots below that show what our own affiliate tool box looks for DAP affiliates who wish to promote DigitalAccessPass.com to others.

Banners

Email Copy

Text Links

 

How To Create The Affiliate Tool Box

Create as many different pages you want on your blog – like “Banners”, “Email Swipe Copy” or “Text Links”.

Or create just one big page for all of this – like “Affiliate Tool Box”.

Download this text file which has all of the ready-made HTML code that you need to insert into the WordPress pages.

Feel free to modify the text as required, and be careful not to delete any of the special characters that are in there just for the formatting.

=> Download Sample Affiliate ToolBox Code

10

DAP As A Global Content + Affiliate Hub

DAP can only protect content on the same domain where it is installed.

So, if you install DAP on SiteA.com, then DAP can only protect content (blog posts/pages and files) on SiteA.com.

If you install DAP on subdomain1.SiteA.com, then DAP can only protect content (blog posts/pages and files) on subdomain1.SiteA.com.

DAP on SiteA.com cannot protect content on SiteB.com.

DAP on SiteA.com cannot protect content on subdomain.SiteA.com.

Similarly, DAP installed on subdomain.SiteA.com cannot protect content on the main domain, SiteA.com

Now, let’s say you own a network of web sites, some sell a product, some sell a membership course, some sell a physical product, and some just exist to build a list.

So let’s say you have 10 sites in all.

And you want someone who’s an affiliate on Site A, to be an affiliate for all ten, and be able to get commissions if the person he referred goes on to purchase a product from any of your 10 web sites.

Yup, DAP can handle that. And here’s how…

Configuration #1

Summary: Parent.com has DAP. Your sales pages are all on different sites, like ChildA.com, ChildB.com and ChildC.com. But all buy buttons point right back to the main DAP site (Parent.com) and that’s where all buyers from all child sites are eventually added to, regardless of where the sale was initiated from. So all members are actually created on Parent.com, and that’s where everyone would log in to access the member content.

1) Install DAP on your main “Parent” site where you have all of your content that needs to be protected/delivered. Make sure all of your content for all of your sites is on this main “Parent” (hub) site.

2) You can then have multiple “Child” sites – completely different domains from your parent site – which are basically just “sales page only” sites. Of course you can have a wordpress blog on each of them and have as much content as you want. Just put the main content to be delivered on the Parent site.

2A) On each of these child sites, you can use any DAP-supported payment processors to sell your products. So for eg., on one “child” site, you can use ClickBank, on another, you can use Paypal, on another you use e-junkie, etc.

3) All buyers end up with an account on your “Parent” site, which is where they get to access their content too. You can set up multiple blogs on one site for different look & feel for all of your various products, and deliver content from the specific blog for the specific product. DAP can support multiple blogs on one site, so that’ll work fine.

4) Since all of your actual products are on one DAP installation, your affiliates can use the same affiliate link for promoting all of your “child” sites. Which means, anyone buying any product across your network, will result in a commission for your affiliate

5) Since all of your users are in one database, email marketing also becomes extremely simple. You can send autoresponders & broadcasts all from within DAP

6) And anyone purchasing any product across your entire network, instantly and automatically becomes a “global” affiliate – which means they can straightaway start promoting any of your web sites. So if your parent site is Parent.com, and you have 3 child sites called childA.com, childB.com and childC.com, then your affiliates’ global affiliate link would be:

http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234

Now if they wanted to promote childA.com, they just use the redirection feature of DAP like this:
http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=www.ChildA.com

Or if they want to point to a specific page on childA, they can do this:
http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=www.ChildA.com/specificpage.php

or
http://Parent.com/dap/a/?a=1234&p=www.ChildA.com/blog/specific-post/

Plus we’re coming up with a “N”-tier affiliate program in 4.0, which will make it even more powerful when you club it with the ‘global’ concept explained above, as every new member becomes a global affiliate, and will also get multi-tiered commissions across ALL purchases across ALL of your child sites.

DAP now supports Coupon codes – which again means your global affiliate will be able to use coupon codes for any product across your network. So the extensions are unlimited, and the possibilities are infinite.

Configuration #2

Summary: There’s only one site – Parent.com. That’s where DAP is installed. All child sites and content for those sites, are created in “sub-folders” on the same Parent.com site.

Parent.com has “dap” in its root folder.

Parent.com/site1/ is a blog for Site 1 which has all of the content for whatever is being sold on Site 1. Sales page can be the root of the “site1” blog itself, or in a separate WordPress Page on that blog.

So you will have one blog per site, each installed as a separate WP installation, in sub-folders of Parent.com.

Parent.com/site1/
Parent.com/site2/
Parent.com/site3/
Parent.com/site4/

Each of the above blogs should have their own copy of the “DAP-WP-Livelinks” plugin.

But only one installation of the “dap” folder itself. DAP is in root.

Parent.com/dap/

The blogs must be in sub-folders of the main domain – they may not be in sub-domains.

So, in a nutshell…

• DAP enables to you have one, large, global “store”.
• This is also your content and affiliate hub, while unifying and standardizing content delivery for all of your products,
• This gives your members a “Single Sign-on” facility, where if they log in to your “Hub Store”, they basically never have to log in again
• All of the content can be made available from one “Content Delivery” site
• Your affiliate program goes “Global” – which means if you’re an affiliate for one site, you can promote all sites and all products in the network using just one affiliate link. Which will help you recruit more affiliates, and help get them excited about promoting your network sites.

 

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, …

1. You don’t have to send your members over to Clickbank to sign up separately for an affiliate account
2. Every member (or buyer)  becomes (at your option, of course) an “automatic” and “instant” affiliate the second they purchase any product or membership level
3. You can do Pay-Per-Lead (can’t do that with CB)
4. You can choose your commission level to whatever you want (CB forces minimum & maximum commission percentages)
5. You control who signs up for your Affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
6. You can kick spammers and abusers out of your affiliate program (can’t do that with CB)
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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)
10. 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.

1. 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)
2. CB takes care of handling commission payments and refunds and charge-backs – so it is less work for you as the admin.
3. 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

 

 

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.

25

“ProductLinks” Widget: Product-Specific Content

You already know that you can create a “My Content” kind of page within WordPress, that will list all products that a user has access to, and then each product will list the content that they currently have access to (content that has already dripped on them).

But this page is a full-summary of all products, all listed on one page.

Instead, if you wished to create product-specific download pages, where you create a separate page for each product, that lists all the content within just that product alone, then that’s where DAP’s “ProductLinks” Widget comes in handy.

Here’s how you set it up.

1. In WordPress admin, go to “Appearance > Widgets” and enable the “DAP ProductLinks” widget by dragging it onto a widgetized section of your theme’s sidebar.
   
2. As soon as you do that, the DAP ProductLinks widget will show up in your blog’s side bar.
   
3. By default, each of the product names – like “Gold Membership” in the above example – will link to whatever URL you put into the “Post-Login URL” for that particular product (DAP Dashboard > Products > Manage). So the next step is to create a separate page for each product, and then enter the permalink for this new page, into the Post-Login URL of that Product within DAP.
4. Create a new page in WordPress – call it, “Gold Membership Content” (for example). In the body of the page, enter the following DAP merge tag:%%PRODUCT_DETAILS_<id>%%
   

   Replace the entire text <id> with the actual Product id from DAP (Products > Manage)

   So, if the product’s id is 6 in DAP, then the merge code becomes:

   %%PRODUCT_DETAILS_6%%

   Save the page. And if you gave the page the title “Gold Membership Content”, then the permalink for this page will be:
   http://YourSite.com/gold-membership-content/

   

5. Take the above permalink and enter it into the product “Gold Membership” in the “Post-Login URL” field. That’s it!
   
6. Do the above for all products and you’re done.

 

End Result

• For each product that your member buys, the “Your Products” widget will show in the side-bar.
• It will list all of the products that the member has purchased.
• Each of the product names will link to it’s own specific content page
• When member goes to that page, the DAP merge tag you entered for that product will expand into product details and product-specific content links just for that product.

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