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

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Comments

3 Responses to “Keeping Your Affiliates Happy – The 2nd Assault”

1. Dan (el_passo) says:

   Tuesday, 31 July 2007 at 3:10 pm

   Just realized that I forgot to add a link to the original article!

   Here it is for anyone that missed it:

   https://elpassoblog.com/how-to-keep-your-affiliates-happy/

2. Randy Smith says:

   Tuesday, 31 July 2007 at 5:09 pm

   Very useful info Dan…..

   Glad I hadn’t got to that bit yet…lol
   Hopefully when I do I’ll remember to check back here and do it right 😉

   Randy
   Marketing Bargains & Freebies

3. Sally says:

   Sunday, 5 August 2007 at 11:29 am

   Nice Work Dan, I have added both posts to my favourites for when I get around to using this.

   Sally 🙂