How To Run The Perfect Affiliate Program

How To Run The Perfect Affiliate Program

Hello and welcome to another article. This weeks article was actually supposed to be a video showing you around one of my affiliate programs and how it is all run, I recorded the video last night but whilst it was being produced the program crashed and I lost the recording, so you’ll have to put up with my writing instead 😉

It’s no co-incidence that I am writing this article at the same time as my Boomerang List Builder affiliate program launch, but I was going to tell you about the launch anyway so I figured I would kill 2 birds with 1 stone and write a newsletter on the same subject.

Running your own affiliate program for your product can be the difference between 10 and 100 sales, if I didn’t have an affiliate program in place, I wouldn’t have sold as many copies of the Boomerang List Builder as I have done, but setting up an affiliate program isn’t all plain sailing. Let me take you by the hand (UK Hell’s Kitchen viewers please note that I am in no way affiliated with Marco Pierre White!) and guide you through setting up your own affiliate program.

Now regular readers will remember that I did a very similar post in February of this year, you can view the article here:

https://elpassoblog.com/how-to-set-up-your-own-affiliate-program/

So I won’t be going over any of that again, if you don’t understand some of the things in this article, refer to the older one above and it should clear a few things up!

Step 1

The first thing that you need to do is decide how you will be running your program, will you be using an in house program, or will you be using someone like clickbank to manage affiliates and commissions?

For the Boomerang List Builder launch I used clickbank, this was because they have a huge affiliate network and they handle all affiliate payments for me. However, due to circumstances beyond my control, clickbank were unable to support the Boomerang List Builder after the launch, so I decided to use my own hosted solution, I use the script “Post Affiliate Pro”.

Step 2

The next step is to set up the tracking, different scripts have different tracking and integration methods so check the instruction manual for your script. Most will require you to add some sort of code to your landing pages, and to your thankyou pages so sales can be tracked. When you are confident everything has been set up, do some testing, I can’t stress how important this is, you need to make sure sales are tracking before you offer your program to the public!

Step 3

This step is something that a lot of people miss out on – customize your affiliate area and affiliate pages! I lose count on the number of times I have joined an affiliate program and I am presented with the same generic sign up pages, it’s only a small thing but it makes me think that if the product creator can’t be bothered to integrate a sign up form into his site design then he obviously doesn’t think much of his affiliates!

Take a look at my sign up page, it’s integrated into my site design and only took 10 minutes to put up:

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Step 4

You need to give your affiliates a reason to promote your product, when they go to your page, they don’t know how the product converts or anything about the product. You can see that on my sign up page I have added a screen shot showing affiliates how the product is converting. With a product that converts at 4.7% (The Boomerang List Builder) they would expect to get, on average, about 5 sales for every 100 visitors they send to the website.

I used DLGuard to process payments and handle the software delivery as it includes a cool little feature that shows you how well your products are converting! You can see my conversions here:

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Step 5

Give your affiliates some resources! And by “resources” I don’t just mean the odd affiliate banner. With the Boomerang List Builder program I have provided affiliates with a range of banners, articles (created just for the affiliate program), promotional emails and even a couple of text links that can be used as forum or email sigs!

Here’s on of my “different” banner designs, don’t worry, there are also some conventional
ones in there as well!

Step 6

Ask existing subscribers and customers to kindly sign up for the affiliate program and help you promote the product, this is where you guys come in 😉

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Many thanks for reading, I do hope that you have found some of this article useful. As I said at the start, if you need to know about things in more detail, including how you go about starting an affiliate program, check out the article here:

https://elpassoblog.com/how-to-set-up-your-own-affiliate-program/

Until next time,
Dan

Free Clickbank Link Generator Script

Hello everyone.

Welcome to another newsletter/article type thing! It’s been a while since I wrote and for that I apologize, it’s been a very hectic couple of weeks what with one thing and another but I’m back on track and that means I can write another newsletter.

To be honest I was struggling to come up with a subject, that was until a friend of mine, Randy Smith, sent me an message asking me if I could fix his broken affiliate page. Randy was using a script that generated affiliate links for his clickbank affiliates, they entered their username, clicked on submit and then it showed them custom links with thier affiliate name included….

Well, that’s what it was supposed to do. To put it blunty, the script was rubbish – it’s just didn’t work!

So instead of playing around with someone elses code I decicded to make my own for Randy. It’s dead easy to do and only takes a few minutes. I had Randy up and running in no time, then he told me I should distribute it, so here I am!

Before I show you how to use it and give you a download link, take a look at what it does:

https://elpassoblog.com/affiliates.html

It’s dead simple, the script takes the affiliate ID from the from, then repeats the ID in the links to personalize them. The demo above is just a quick example using one of my own products – please don’t use the links generated in the demo to promote the Boomerang List Builder as the product isn’t sold via clickbank so you won’t get a commission! (The affiliate program will be coming soon, stay tuned!)

I’ve made the page very plain so that they can easily be integrated with your existing website. The script is free to download, all I ask is that you leave the footer link back to this page intact! You can change the text, or the table colours of the footer link but please do leave the text as it is.

Click Here To Download The Script >>

How To Use It!

After you have downloaded you will see 2 files, affiliates.html and affiliates.php

Both files can be fully customized in your favourite editor. (Dreamweaver, Frontpage etc.)

The HTML file contains a web form that collects the UserID and the PHP page displays the dynamic links.

All you need to do is run your favourite find/replace software, or if you want to do it manually you can. And replace:

boomlist

With:

Your own clickbank ID. – Or in other words, the ID of the product you are selling.

When done, upload both files to your server and direct your customer to the HTML file – done!

That’s it, your script will now work. If you want to add any more affiliate resources to the PHP page, simply use mine as a starting point and add the following PHP code wherever you want the users clickbank ID to be displayed:

<?php echo $_GET[“clickbankID”]; ?>

So a standard link on the PHP page would look like this:

I think that just about covers everything, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. It’s probably best to post your question as a comment, then when I answer it’s visible to other users as well.

Cheers!
Dan

How To Spy On Your Website Visitors

How To Spy On Your Website Visitors

Greetings everyone to another newsletter. Apologies for taking so long to write a newsletter, but I’ve been run off my feet putting the finishing touches to my Boomerang List Builder launch. (Coming this Thursday – September 13th at 5pm UK time, 12 noon EST!)

In this article I will show you how to track your website visitors and improve your sales.

To begin with let me just say that I am not too keen on the word “Spy” in the title of this article, but I couldn’t really think of another word to describe it!

A couple of weeks ago I came across a free website that allows you to track all of your website visitors, by “track” I don’t mean the usual “link tracking” techniques or page views that you can get by using Google analytics, this site let’s you view videos of where your website visitors are going.

It shows you mouse gestures, clicks and much more. Whilst there is no definite correlation to the mouse movements and where the person is looking on the page, it does give you quite a good idea of what parts of the page your visitors are looking at and how they are able to navigate through your website.

You can also use this to increase sales.

I have implemented it in one of my websites and it helps me to track the checkout process (without me seeing any personal information of course!). Using the video playback I can see how many customers are going through with the sale, and how many are exiting during the checkout process.

I have only been going for a couple of weeks but already I have started to see some trends, it has allowed me to tweak my checkout process and increase my sales conversions.

As I said, it’s 100% free, and the link below isn’t even an affiliate link – I must be losing my touch 😉

http://www.robotreplay.com/

It’s dead simple to implement into your pages, just place a small snippet of javascript code into the <head> section of your HTML code and the site will start tracking your visitors within a few minutes.

Whilst it’s very helpful to someone like me, I would be very interested to hear what you all think. Even though no personal data is recorded do you think would be a privacy concern for the people that visited the website, if they knew about it would they think twice before visiting?

I’d be interested to hear your opinions, feel free to leave a comment.

Now I’d better get back to putting my launch together!

Cheers,
Dan.

P.S. This is totally un-related to internet marketing but “Pandora” is now 100% free! If you haven’t come across it before, Pandora is an online radio station that plays only music that you like, type in a song or artist that you like and Pandora will create a custom play list for you 🙂

Keeping Your Affiliates Happy – The 2nd Assault

Hello and welcome to this edition of the El Passo Newsletter. I decided to spice it up a bit by giving it a
movie sequel type title, I can assure you that “The 2nd Assault” won’t just be a cheap re-hash of
Keeping Your Affiliates Happy Part 1 😉

This article came about after I received a question about my last “Keep Affiliates Happy”
post. The question came in and said this:

“What happens if the user enters the site without coming from an
affiliate link?”

A very good question it was as well! There was a flaw in the system, if the visitor didn’t come
via an affiliate link, the link in Aweber would be all messed up and it wouldn’t work.

So I decided to look around for a solution, luckily it only took a couple of lines of code!

First of all you need to understand how clickbank HOP links work, usually the HOP
value is the affiliate ID, but you can also use what I call a “null value” which will set the affiliate ID as “blank”. This null value is simply “xxxxx” - five x’s!

So if we replace the affiliateID with xxxxx the clickbank link will work, and it will
set the affiliate ID as blank.

I’m finding this quite difficult to explain, maybe it’s the sunshine we seem to have
in Yorkshire today, here is the code, hopefully this will make things clearer!

Looking at the code you can see that the first line (after the <? ) is exactly the
same as in part one of this article. Then, on line two we start with an IF
statement. In English this means:

IF the hop value is blank (IE: If the user hasn’t come from an affiliate link)

Then set the hop value to “xxxxx” (Our null value)

That’s all you need to do, those two extra lines of code will pass “xxxxx” to
Aweber if an affiliateID is not present.

This means that your follow up sequence of messages will work,
even if the user hasn’t come to your site via an affiliate link.

I hope you enjoyed the newsletter, sorry if it sounded a bit brief but
I am rushing to get this out before I head off to a football (soccer) game!

Until next time,

Regards,
Dan

How To Keep Your Affiliates Happy

How To Keep Your Affiliates Happy

“There’s no way I’m promoting your product, you have an opt-in form and I will lose all my commissions!”

Did you hear that?

That was the sound of an angry marketer ;-)A lot of marketers don’t like promoting products that contain and opt-in box or a squeeze page on the sales page, they believe that people may sign up to the newsletter and then buy the product in a few weeks, meaning they would be a lot less likely to get credit for any sales.

This is understandable; if an affiliate promotes your product they deserve to be rewarded when a visitor they sent to your site decides to buy.

What I don’t understand is why people don’t just use a very simple snippet of PHP code on their sales page to capture the affiliate ID and then pass it to their auto responder. You can then send out follow up messages that contain the affiliates ID so they won’t lose out on any sales.

“I don’t know how to do it!?”

Did you hear that?

That was the sound of you, wanting me to show you how it’s done 😉

As I don’t like to disappoint here is the dead simple way I capture the affiliate ID and send it to my auto responder so that affiliates don’t lose out on any commissions. In this example I will be using a Clickbank affiliate link and Aweber, however you can use this method with most affiliate programs and auto responders.

Step 1

Set up a web form in your Aweber control panel (List Settings > Web Forms)

Fill in step 1 as you normally would, then on step 2 click on the “Add New Field” link and enter the details as shown in the screen below. You can give the label any name you like, but in this example I will just call it “aff”.

Step 2

Save the web form and then go to either a follow up message or a broadcast message. Add a new follow up/broadcast message. Click into the box where you usually type in your message and click on the “Personalized Fields” drop down box.

You will notice that at the bottom of the list we have a new filed called {!custom aff”}

Placing this tag in your message will insert the affiliates ID into the message, so if you were using a Clickbank style link, the format would be:

http://{!custom aff}.VENDOR.hop.Clickbank.net

Step 3

We have now set up Aweber to save our affiliate ID. Now you need to place the opt-in form onto our sales page.

Go back to the Web Forms page in Aweber and click on the “Get HTML” link. For this example we MUST use the HTML code, not the javascript option. Copy the HTML form code onto your sales page.

Step 4

Open up your sales page and put the following code underneath your <body> tag:

<?
$hop=$_GET[‘hop’];
?>

Then find your HTML opt-in box code you just entered. Look for the line of code that says:

We now simply add this into the value variable using this code:<?PHP echo $hop; ?>

Save the page and upload. Before we go any further I should point out the you must save your page with a .php extension, or use your .htaccess file to parse all HTML pages as PHP. (If you don’t understand this post a comment and I will clarify for you!)

Step 5

We now have everything in place, not so difficult was it?

The PHP code will now pass the “hop=” information into our Aweber form, the Aweber form will then display the affiliate ID in our follow up messages so that affiliates no longer lose out on any commissions made via the follow up series of messages!

That brings to an end this week’s newsletter; did you find it useful or just plain confusing?

I was thinking of making a video tutorial showing how to do this with different styles of affiliate links, what do you think?

Until next time,
Dan

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