Be sure to activate your affiliate module in the admin settings / applications.

Setting Up Your Affiliate Program

Getting this program going is easy, but you are not there yet.  Now it's time to setup the specifics of the program like payments, details, etc.  We do this in the administrator options area of the affiliate program.

1. To access the admin options for this application, either enter the application by clicking on the "Check Your Affiliate Commissions" link, then click the icon to the right at the top of the application, or view the application list (application & tools icon in the header) and click the admin options icon for the affiliate program application.
2. Here you enter information about your program that will be shared with the affiliates.  Details and explanations are on this page.

Be sure to setup your affiliate program soon after activating it -- especially if you have an active group.  The "Check Your Affiliate Commissions" link will display soon as the group is activated.

You will notice two columns to input commissions for each action. The column on the left is the first tier, and the column on the right is the second tier.  You can choose to make this a one or two tier affiliate program.  If you choose two tier, enter values in the second column.  This would mean that you are compensating affiliates for the sales of the affiliates that they signed up.  A standard second tier commission percentage is between 5-25%.

A Detailed Overview of How the Affiliate Program Works

So far we have activated and setup our affiliate program.  We are officially ready to go!  Let's go through the process as an affiliate of referring a new member, then we will go through the process as an administrator of paying the affiliate(s).

1. Only your members can be affiliates of your group.  If you don't want to charge affiliates for membership, your best bet is to offer free limited membership.  As a member who is logged in, the affiliate will see the "Check Your Affiliate Commissions" link at the top of every page in your iGrOOp.  They get started by clicking on that link.
2. Here they will see all the details of the program that were automatically inserted when you entered your setup information.  Most importantly, they will see their affiliate URL.  The affiliate uses this URL to share with others and use as a link on their website(s).
3. Once a prospective member clicks on the affiliate link, a cookie is set on their computer that will stay there for over a year or until manually cleared.  This cookie will ensure that if that prospect signs up for membership, the affiliate will get credit.
4. Once the prospect signs up for membership, the affiliate gets a notice by e-mail.  Until the membership is approved by the admin, and showing as active, no commission is awarded, but the order will immediately show in the affiliate's commissions.  Only when active will the commission have a value (if the membership sold was a commissionable action as defined in the admin setup).
5. As the site administrator, you can check your affiliate's commissions by entering the affiliate program area, then clicking the "Admin Area" link.  This area will show you all of your affiliates who have referred members and any money due to them.
6. When you are ready to pay the affiliates, click the "download PayPal masspay file" link and save the file locally.  This is the file that you upload in the PayPal masspay section (at PayPal.com) to automatically pay all of your affiliates.

The affiliate can click on the user preferences icon in the affiliate program application to set custom contact information for their affiliate URL. 

That is it!  The program is very simple from the affiliate's point of view as well as the admin.  This simplicity results in more participation.  For more details on this program and some advanced ideas, see the supporting material links at the top of this page.

Some Technical Notes:

• Affiliates will NOT get paid (or show a $0 amount) if 
  • their "membership status" is not set at "approved"
  • the "payment type" is a promotion code
  • the "Payment type" does not have value
  • their nickname is the same as their referral code (ie they are trying to get commission for their own account)
  • the "amount paid" is $0
• This program is designed to pay affiliates once a month.  We strongly suggest not altering that pay cycle.
• There is no renewal commissions for yearly memberships, due to the many options for an admin to modify the yearly memberships (extending, shortening date, etc)
• If you are using a free trial period, the "effective date" is the registration date PLUS the free trial.  This ensures that commissions are not due until after the member has paid.
• If you change the freetrail date, all existing memberships will reflect the new freetrial date.

Create banners and buttons for your affiliates!  The more choices you have available, the more likely the affiliates will be to market your services.  iGrOOps has a banner design package that you should check out.

Advanced Use: Using an Outside Website as Your Main Page

Let's say you have an outside (non iGrOOps) page where you want to send prospects first - and you do NOT want to send prospects to your main iGrOOps site or ecommerce product page.  You can do this and retain the "cookie" by making a slight change to your main website.

This "hack" assumes you have PERL on your server, and appropriate permissions and access rights to make this change.  If you do not, contact your webmaster and show him or her this section, ask what they can do.  This code can easily be rewritten in other languages.

1. Make sure your website will see an index.cgi file before other index types.  You can do this by adding an ".htaccess" file to your website's main HTML directory and making sure it has this line: DirectoryIndex index.cgi index.html index.php index.htm
2. Place an "index.cgi" file in your main HTML folder.  The default file is shown below.  Note the changes you will need to make to the file before uploading.
3. Change the mode of the index.cgi to 755.  This is executable.
4. Test! Now enter your main domain name with a "?affilateid" appended to it.  For example, if your main website is http://www.mysite.com, and the affiliate id is "myid", then http://www.mysite.com?myid should take you to your main page AND write the cookies to your iGrOOp as well.  So if this affiliate signed up for membership to your iGrOOp, the referring id would be "myid".

Here is the code for the index.cgi file (note: no lines should wrap):

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

# is affiliate code attached?
if ($ENV{'QUERY_STRING'}) {
   ($aff,$page)=split(/\+/,$ENV{'QUERY_STRING'});
   print "Set-Cookie: refcode=$aff; expires=Mon, 20-Sep-2010 12:00:00 GMT; path=\/\r\n";
   print "Location: http://www.myigroop.com/?$aff+SENDBACK_www_mysite_com+$page\n\n";
   exit;

} else {
   print "Location: http://www.mysite.com/index.html\n\n";
   exit;
}

Substitutions in RED:

• be sure to change to your server's location of PERL
• http://www.myigroop.com should be the URL for your iGrOOp's home page (just the domain)
• SENDBACK_www_mysite_com is the domain our scripts will send the user back to.  Notice the "."'s in the URL are replaced with "_" (underscores)
• http://www.mysite.com/index.html is your main site's homepage file.  You cannot just use your master domain name here, you need to append your index file.

OPTION: The script can handle an optional "page" argument.  This means you do not have to use your main website's homepage for this, but any page within the main HTML folder on that server by including the page name as an argument to the original call.  For example: http://www.mysite.com?myid could be  http://www.mysite.com?myid+promo.html.